Facebook Overhauls Its Access Your Information Tool

Access Your Information debuted in March 2018.

Facebook said in a blog post Tuesday, “Over the years, we’ve developed tools to make it easier for people to view and download data on how they’ve used our services. We first launched Access Your Information in 2018 so that people could have a central place to access their information on Facebook. Now that we’ve had some time to learn about how people use it, we’ve reorganized and given it a new coat of paint, so that it’s even more usable and transparent. We want to make sure that your information on Facebook is useful, easy to understand and easy to find.”

The tool originally split the information made available to users into two categories: Your Information and Information About You.

People now have eight categories to choose from:

• Ads Information
• Apps and Websites Off of Facebook
• Friends and Followers
• Logged Information
• Personal Information
• Preferences
• Security and Login Information
• Your Activity Across Facebook

The social network said each of these categories breaks down further into subcategories, making it easier for people to find the exact type of data they are interested in.

Search functionality was added, also enabling people to more easily find data categories. Facebook wrote, “For example, if you start searching for information about your location history, searching for ‘location’ should start generating some suggestions.”

Facebook is adding information about how people’s data may be used to personalize their experience, such as if someone’s primary location was one of the multiple signals that informed a recent ad served to them from a food delivery application. This information was already available in the social network’s “Why am I seeing this ad” tool.

The revamped Access Your Information tool is available on Android and iOS, with plans to extend it to other platforms soon.