Give Me My Data
- About Your Data
- How To Use
- Frequently Asked Questions
- About Data Formats
- Privacy Policy
- Media
- Images created with GMMD
- Share
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- Give Me My Data is 100% free, but you are welcome to show your support for the project.
reclaim and reuse your Facebook data.
About Give Me My Data
Give Me My Data is a Facebook application designed to give users the ability to export their data out of Facebook for any purpose they see fit. This could include making artwork, archiving and deleting your account, or circumventing the interface Facebook provides. Data can be exported in CSV, XML, and other common formats. Give Me My Data is currently in public-beta.
Give Me My Data is developed by Owen Mundy.
About Your Data
According to Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
"You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings."
Give Me My Data helps you to exercise this right by presenting your information in easy to use formats.
How To Use
- Select the data type you wish to retrieve.
- Select how you would like the data formatted. Most people choose "plain text."
- Click the "Give me my data" button.
You can copy and paste information from Give Me My Data into any text editor. Here is a list of editors for Macintosh and Windows platforms:
- Google Docs (Mac and Win)
- TextEdit (Mac)
- Pages (Mac)
- NotePad++ (Win)
- Microft Word (Win)
After you have copied and pasted your information into an editor you can do a number of things depending on the format you chose. All data formats allow you to examine the text and copy and paste the exact information you are trying to retrieve from Facebook.
You can also save the text with a new extension to be able to open the file in other applications. For example, to view your CSV data just save the plain text file with the .csv extension and open it in any spreadsheet software like Numbers (Mac), Microsoft Excel (Win) or OpenOffice, which is free and works on all operating systems.
XML is a popular format for archiving and presenting data with other software. There are many free XML viewers available. For example you can view XML files with the Firefox web browser. Also, check out a list of Visualization Options for CSV and XML data on the ManyEyes website.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can I get my groups, likes, links, etc. back onto my info page?
Give Me My Data is designed only to export a copy of your information from Facebook to allow you to access and manipulate your data yourself. Putting it back into Facebook is unfortunately a manual process.
link to thisWhy do I have to allow Give Me My Data access to my information?
In order to function Give Me My Data will need to access your information. Click "Allow" when you encounter this screen to start reclaiming your data.
This app does not work, it did not fix my facebook page.
Give Me My Data is not designed to "fix your facebook page." The primary goal is to give you agency over your data by allowing you to export and manipulate it regardless of (and in spite if you like) the interface which you are presented.
link to thisAbout Data Formats
A file format is a particular way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. The file extension indicates the type of file format as well as the application may open the file.
| extension | name | description |
|---|---|---|
| TXT | plain text | Text that contains no visual formatting. |
| CSV | Comma-Separated Values | Used for the digital storage of tabular data such as a database or spreadsheet. Each line in the CSV file corresponds to a row in the table. CSV files can be opened in any spreadsheet application like Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers. |
| XML | Extensible Markup Language | A set of rules for encoding documents electronically. |
| DOT | Graphviz DOT Language | A plain text graph description language for use with Graphviz. |
| SQL | Structured Query Language | A database computer language designed for managing data in relational database management systems. |
| MM | FreeMind | An XML-based language used by FreeMind mind mapping software. |
Privacy Policy
Give Me My Data respects your privacy and therefore does not save any information about you or your friends in any form. In addition to the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, required for anyone who uses Facebook, applications and developers are bound by the Facebook Developer Principles & Policies
Media
Facebook App Brings Back Data
by Riva Richmond, New York Times, May 1, 2010
Give Me My Data Helps Refill Blanked Facebook Profiles
by Curt Hopkins, ReadWriteWeb, May 2, 2010
Two Facebook Apps To Help You Fight Back Against Facebook
by Chris Walters, The Consumerist, May 4, 2010
Facebook’s Disconnect: Open Doors, Closed Exits
by Rohit Khare, TechCrunch, May 7, 2010
Die peinlichsten Einträge bei Facebook, StudiVZ und Twitter
English: The most embarrassing messages on Facebook, StudiVZ, and Twitter
Bild, May 22, 2010
3D movies and extracting Facebook data
by Kate Russell, BBC News, Friday, June 25th, 2010
Images made with Give Me My Data
The following images were created with data retrieved by Give Me My Data. I'm making high resolution versions available for editorial purposes only. Please contact me if you use these.
Requests
Things I'm working on...
- Retrieve mutual friends.
- Work on more instructions for using data to make images.
- Finish MM format.
- Create link to download data in common file formats (XLS, DOC).
Translate UNIX timestamp to human-readable ISO-8601 / W3 datetime (defaults to user's timezone).- Figure out why calls for data in excess of specific amounts returns errors or truncated sections (e.g. >= 1,872 links, >= 573 messages, "a bizillion" status updates).
- Slow connections seem to be causing errors.
- Migrate application to new API.
- Create link to download photos stored in Facebook.
- Fix CSV files for multiples.
- Fix XML node types.
- Export in FOAF.
