Sophos is sharing the tale of a Facebook critic who says he has been foiled in his efforts to download his user data from the social networking giant.
Facebook has been stingy with user data, and last fall it changed its policies about what data it will share with you and how it will share that data with you. Whereas the company used to mail CD’s to users who requested their data, the November change started sending them to a site where they could download the information.
Or maybe not. John Alarcon told Sophos’s Naked Security blog that after emailing Facebook his data request as instructed, he was sent a link to the dowloading tool in an autoreply to his request. That link hasn’t worked but has instead sent Alarcorn a message telling him to try his request again each time he has clicked on the link.
We’ve asked Facebook for comment and will update as soon as we hear back from the company.
Alarcorn didn’t give up easily: he then went to another form offered by Facebook and, as requested, submitted a copy of his drivers license with his request. That lead to another email loop, including boilerplate language in Facebook’s autoreply that was pulled from its help section.
“I strongly suspect Facebook has crippled my account due to my outspoken criticism,” Alacorn, who has been outspoken about Facebook’s privacy policies, told Sophos. “It is no secret that I intend to leave Facebook as soon as I have a copy of my data…and it’s sure feeling like a strange coincidence that they won’t even accept a basic bug report from my account now after I’ve tried numerous times to use a basic feature that’s seeming still working for others.”
