The Apple CEO, Tim Cook recently called for new data protection laws in the US, similar to the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, allowing people to access, download, correct, or even delete their personal information.
You can view your personal information that Facebook, Google etc hold on you and delete much of it.
Facebook owns the information it collects from its users and after the data harvesting revelations, it became clear to many that Facebook is a business based on data as a product and mass-surveillance.
Deactivating your Facebook account is a temporary measure that hides your profile and timeline, but leaves your data permanently stored on FB’s servers.
By deleting your account, your information will remain on FB’s servers for 90 days (according to the FB Help Center, anyway) although traces of your interactions with other FB users will still remain.
You can remove associations between third-party apps and Facebook in the following way;
1. Go to Settings
2. Click Apps and Websites
3. Check all apps and then clicking “Remove.”
Facebook compiles so much user data that it has to be separated into sections and logs to make it more manageable.
Your activity logs and status updates can be found by following this link; activity logs
An archive of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook can be downloaded and it may be several gigabytes in size.
A map showing all the place you’ve ever been can be accessed here;
You can do a Google privacy search to find out what the Google services are collecting on you and look at your activity page, detailing all your search history, Google Maps searches, Youtube videos watched and you can even listen to your Google Assistant voice requests.
Deleting your Google activity can be done via this link
Do you use Alexa? Take a look at the devices page and click on the “actions” box. Here you will find all the audio requests to Alexa that Amazon has linked to your account.
Your Twitter archive can be downloaded in a zip file by visiting the account settings page and navigating to the “download your data” section
You can download the data Microsoft stores on you from the Microsoft privacy hub and this doesn’t just apply to Windows users, but also Xbox, Skype and Hotmail users.
Apparently, Apple do not collect much user data, but you can see what do have via the data and privacy page
I had thousands of requests from a few people for this article, so I hope you found it useful.