I downloaded my Facebook data because I wanted to see what advertisers knew about me. I was fairly certain it would not be much. I was right. I generally browse the web in two modes. I use incognito (Chrome) or private mode (Firefox) to cut down on ads that generally slow down the loading of pages. For anything I don’t log into I browse regularly. It’s not intentional, so advertisers can not follow my movements across the web, it is a side affect.

Here’s what I learned:

I first got on to Facebook on August 30, 2008, when we evacuated to Atlanta during Hurricane Gustav. I know this because my first post is “ran away from Gustav.” I immediately started adding friends. My brother-in-law was the first person to respond with “John Bolles is on Facebook? This is definitely the dawn of a new era.” It was.

While your timeline is a stroll down memory lane, it is the Ads section which will tell you how and which advertisers are targeting you. Mine I found remarkably boring. The first five topics were Bicycle, Food, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Faubourg and NASA. I must not like lots of posts on Facebook. Also the number of advertisers who had my contact info numbered twelve. The big surprises were Demi Lovato, Fabletics and Kate Hudson. Had to look up the first two. Not sure how I got on their lists. Others such as Viking River and Ocean Cruises is actually kind of funny because taking a Viking Cruise is an inside joke with my wife. Maybe there is some truth to Facebook listening through the computer’s microphone.

My wife graciously allowed me to look at her Facebook data and I saw right away she has a different online profile from me. While my data download was only 82 megabytes in size, her’s was 212 megabytes. They had a much larger number of ad topics for her probably based on clicking of ads that were presented to her. Also the number of  advertisers who had her contact info had to be over 150. This is probably true for the average Facebook user.

People who are joining the #DeleteFacebook movement maybe overreacting. Mark Zuckerberg is right that this is something we agreed to. I would be curious to see what data Google has on me. With their command of search they probably have a much more extensive profile to sell to advertisers.

If you want to download your own data I highly recommend it. Go to Settings and at the bottom of General Account Settings click on “Download a copy of your Facebook data.”