FB updates Download Your Information tool; offers expanded archives.

Those of us who’re on Facebook would know the joys of sharing a few, chosen moments of our lives with our friends, relatives and other acquaintances (if you’d choose to), and today for their 800 million stronghold, Facebook is all about social networking and sharing. Back in 2010, Facebook had released a tool called Download your Information, using which users could download a copy of all that they’ve ever shared on Facebook, be it their private photos, messages and chat conversations, videos, wall posts, names of friends and the e-mail addresses belonging to some of them, et al. Now, in an update to their Download your Information tool, Facebook’s offering what it calls an expanded archive - simply meaning that users can now download a copy of their expanded archives with additional details that the social networking had been storing, all this while. So, if you’ve already downloaded a copy of your archives, then here’s the chance to download all the additional details, which include the data that's logged when you interact with Facebook.

Head over to Account Settings on your Facebook profile and just there you have the option to download your archives. After a brief pause that the site takes to collect all that you’ve ever shared, you’re sent an e-mail to the address that has been listed on your account; done as a security check. This is done to ensure that it is the user who has initiated the process of downloading the archive. On receiving the e-mail, the user will have to re-enter their password. If the user is accessing his account from a public computer or from one, which he doesn't use regularly, then he may have to solve a friend photo captcha or an SMS captcha via their mobile phone.

Here comes the biggie. On downloading the expanded archive, users can get themselves a copy of their information, like IP addresses (all that the site has ever stored, not necessarily meaning all the IP addresses that have ever accessed your account), login details (a stored list of logins, but again, not necessarily every login during the account’s history), logout info (IP addresses from which a user logged out of), pending friend requests (details of the friends requests you both sent and received; also those you received, but didn't accept or deny), Account status changes (Dates when a user's account was re-activated, deactivated, disabled or deleted), Information of the pokes exchanged, details on the Events the user accepted, declined or responded to. In addition to these details, the archive will also contain details on All the mobile phone numbers a user may have added to his or her account, the user's city and hometown (whatever is currently listed), names of the family members a user has listed on their account, the user's relationship information (names and statuses), a list of the languages that a user has added to his or her profile and a history of changes, if any made to the name on the user's account.

Facebook has affirmed that they may continue to add more features to their tool in the future, covering more categories. Facebook further adds that it is essential to users to keep a copy of their information, whether on Facebook or elsewhere on the web, since it gives them more control over what they share. While it goes without saying that a tool like this would be beneficial to retrieve the information you may have stored on Facebook only, but didn't have access to, all this while. Click here to get more details on the updated tool.