Facebook Updates 'Download Your Data' Tool With More Insight Into How it Uses Your Information

Facebook is adding some new sections to its 'Download Your Data' (Instagram) and 'Download Your Information' (Facebook) tools in order to provide more transparency over the information it collects on your activities, and how it uses them to show you more relevant ads and content as a result.

As explained by Facebook:

"Over the last decade we’ve been working to extend the functionality of our self-service data access tools to help people access data in meaningful ways. Today’s step is part of these efforts. There have also been growing efforts by many policymakers and regulators to enhance people’s rights around access to their data. These laws include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, which was implemented in 2018 and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which took effect earlier this year."

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Essentially, Facebook is adding these new sections to ensure full adherence to the CCPA, providing access to more complete insight into the various ways in which its platforms track and store user information - and what that information is, specifically, for your profile.

The new elements now included in your data reports will be:

Interactions on Facebook and Instagram -

Facebook will now provide information on the actions you take on its platforms, including profile updates, Page and post Likes, comments, etc. Much of this information was already included in its previous report option, but Facebook is adding more specific insight to increase transparency over its processes.

Inferences Used to Improve Your Experiences -

Facebook will also now include more data on 'inferences', or data correlations that it uses to show you more relevant content. "For example, if someone shares an article about a football team that one of their friends posted, we may show them other football-related content. We infer that the person is interested in football because they engaged with their friend’s article about the sport". Inferences are essentially educated guesses based on what you engage with.

Categories Assigned to Instagram Accounts - Facebook will also now include a list of the categories it's assigned to each user on Instagram, which it uses to suggest content in the Explore tab (you can get an idea of this already via Ad Interests on Instagram and Facebook's Ad Preferences).