Analyzing 10 years of my online life - all my facebook, google and linkedin data

Quantified Self Apps & Tools
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Hi,

My motivation: With all the new GDPR laws taking effect, I realized I could download all my data from Facebook, Google and Instagram and use that to learn more about myself and more importantly what these companies knew about me.

Who am I: I’m a 27 year old ex-google engineer who and has been interested in the QS movement specifically for my health but then realized theres so much more analyze.

How I did it: I used bigquery to store, query and encrypt my data and then javascript to show the results. I also made it into a tool: https://hey.ai if you want to try it for yourself.

Insights:

Friends - Who likes me and who I like
By looking at my facebook posts I realized that the people who comment on my posts were never the people who I thought of “real- friends”. A little bit more digging and I found I had 3 different types of friends:

A) "friends (in the normal sense of the term)"

These were people who I was Fb friends with but who I had also messaged on facebook to a large extent.

B) “people who want to be better friends with me”

These were people who commented on my photos and commented on posts and replied to comments. I realized these people were showing interest in me. I decided I needed to spend more time with these people to see if we could strengthen our relationship.

C) “people whose posts I commented on a lot”

So there was this set of people that I spent a lot of time commenting on who I wasn’t really close with. I realized these were people I had been actively trying to get to know or who seemed to attract me with their contact. I decided to start having IRL meetings with these people as I already found them interesting.

Hello Youtube, Goodbye Facebook.
Over the past year I’ve seen I’ve completely gone off Facebook and now spend much more time on Youtube. I knew this was kind of true but didn’t realize how true till I looked at the graphs. I peaked at 125 facebook posts in 1 year. Definitely way way over sharing. :-/

I found out a lot more about myself. I wrote a blog post here: https://medium.com/hey-ai/insights-from-10-years-of-facebook-youtube-instagram-and-google-usage-9261ae9feabf

If you want to find out about yourself and your relationships you can also use my tool: https://hey.ai . We encrypt all your data - so even we can’t access it and theres a button to 1 push delete everything. (Also we don’t sell any of your data of course).

Anyway let me know if you have any questions!!

3 Likes
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This is awesome!

For some reason none of my messenger data loaded from facebook (I double-checked in it was checked as one of the data types to export). Any troubleshooting suggestions for that?

Thanks for this tool!!

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Hi Kelly,

Thanks for trying our tool.

Re: Facebook messenger.
Could it be possible that there were no messages for the dates you selected to export data on facebook? That’s the only thing I could think off.

I’ll look for error trace in our logs to see if there were errors during upload but since we can’t see your data, that’s about all I can do. Let me check.

Thanks again for using the tool, and please let me know how I can help make it better for you. Ie what would you like to see added. People have told us everything from:

“tell me who has wished me happy birthday every year for the last 5 years” to

“help me keep in touch with my best friends by reminding me to connect with them every 2 weeks”

"tell me who I haven’t gotten in touch with for years but is a good friend of mine "

“_show me my kids photos during every halloween”

So Kelly, was there anything else you would like to see added to the report?

thanks,
Hari

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Hmm there are definitely a lot of messages there. In the raw facebook export folder I can find them in messages -> inbox, with folders for each user I messaged that contain a .json file of the messages.

Brainstorming here, some other interesting summaries to see could be:

  • how many times other people (and who) like things that you post on your timeline (it shows comments, and it shows likes of pictures, but I don’t think it shows likes of timeline posts? Not sure if that data was included in the facebook export, though)

  • Visualizations that break down the bar graphs (e.g. of profiles you searched, who you reacted to, comments by day of the week) by different time scales (e.g. comparison across years, or months), similar to rescuetime summaries by week, month, year, etc. I see that you can view for certain time windows, but it would be cool to see how who I interact with changed over time in one plot.

  • List of the labels/interests about me that advertisers see, and who advertises to me (I pulled this out in the raw .json file and thought it was pretty amusing, so others might be interested to see this in the tool interface)

  • I don’t think this info is actually in the export either, but as a social network researcher I think it would be really cool to see a network of my friends, and which of my friends are friends, etc. I know at one point there was a program that would do this that doesn’t exist anymore. Do you happen to know of one?

  • Anything that could break down a ratio of how often i contact a person vs how often they contact me.

Again, cool tool! I’ve been recommending to my friends.

-Kelly

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what happened to hey.ai?