Facebook decided to expand the “Download Your Information” feature by throwing in additional data categories with hopes of appeasing privacy advocates, but it seems as though this bit of effort has failed to achieve the desired result. Despite updating the “Download Your Information” tool which enable users to access some of the information that Facebook collects and stashes them for a wider breadth of data, their latest effort is still not enough – never mind that you can now check out the previous names that users might have used, one’s friend request history, as well as the list of the IP addresses which were used to access Facebook.
Originally introduced two years ago, Download Your Information basically empowered users to reclaim all of their photos and videos, Wall posts, sent and received messages, list of friends, notes, certain events, selected comments, and chat conversations in a .ZIP file format. Critics are still not happy though, and according to 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems, “We welcome that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law. With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”
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