Facebook Knows What You Eat: Discover The Entire Data Facebook Collects About You, Step By Step.

(Technical Details — Feel Free To Skip)

For the geeks among us, Let me elaborate.

I chose to go with a docker stack composed of ELK (Elastic + LogStash + Kibana) components. I implemented a custom LogStash file stream that preprocessed the interesting JSON files from the downloaded ZIP archive to ElasticSearch.

Then I split the records that contained multiple elements (events, clicks, likes, notifications, marketplace item clicks, etc.) so I could query real Facebook objects easily (as if they are indexed in a GraphQL), and create ElasticSearch indexes with my interesting fields.
An ElasticSearch service from the stack would index all my events that ever took place inside Facebook’s servers regarding my data.
Later on, We are going to visualize the data and research it using Kibana.

The Compose file (which can be translated to Kubernetes services using Kompose) is available at at end of the post.

I ran docker-compose up and it all started to play.
After some samples went through ElasticSearch, I created index patterns manually using 1 click.

Finally, using Kibana, I started to work with these pieces of data and understood what I was facing.

There is an insane amount of data about me.
I am not talking about the obvious data Facebook collects from their services… A lot of the data came from other places.

I had to focus. There was too much.
Let’s take a look at the Ads And Business dashboard I created, which covers only some of Facebook’s relationships with more than 300 companies.

So, my question is: What do they Buy and Sell about me?
After years of using their products (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) for Free, they must know me pretty well.

Facebook receives much of its information from 3rd party apps and services. I didn’t even need to actually have a Facebook, an Instagram, or a WhatsApp account connected to any of these apps in order to be identified.

I had to make the data visible somehow:

A (pretty censored) version of the data I’m about to show you. Open-Source code at the end of the post.

They know about each and every digital incident that took place on 300+ websites, Which I am really using, or have used, without logging into Facebook or relating to it in any way.

They know how I pay for each and every service, what apps I’ve installed or changed, and what websites I visited, thanks to Facebook Pixel technology and other “great, privacy-respecting” tools.