Imagine for a moment that everyone on the planet lives in one huge building, and special agents keep things in order there. The laws operating in the building state that every action of these agents is determined exclusively by a concern for its inhabitants’ safety. But the moment comes when you notice that these agents are watching over you everywhere. They control your conversations, your actions, your location, and what you say. Can you see what we’re talking about?

Using the results of an investigation carried out by the publication Propublica, FunnyModo decided to reveal just how much social networks know about you.

This is what Facebook remembers:

• Everything you like: photographs, notes, people, videos, comments. It analyzes all of your likes and shares.
• All of your personal messages with every single other user.
• All of your deleted messages, wall posts, and comments. Even if you wiped them long ago, they’ll always remain on Facebook’s servers.
• All of your uncompleted posts that you started typing but never published. Yes, that’s right — Facebook remembers even the things you change your mind about publishing and delete!

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• All the photographs and videos you post and also those you share. And even those that other users share with you.
• The time when you either became or stopped being friends with someone and when you actively communicated with them.
• All of your actions, likes, and posts through Instagram or WhatsApp (both of which are owned by Facebook).

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• All the events you attend and the places, cities, and countries you visit.
• All the devices you’ve used to log in to your account.
• All the things you’ve done on websites where you’ve registered/signed up by logging in through Facebook. The chances are this is all the sites where registration is required since signing up using your email account takes longer and is less habitual than using Facebook.

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• Your education level and your income.
• The websites you’ve visited via posts or adverts on your Facebook news feed. Have you ever wondered why Facebook advertises things that genuinely interest you in particular?
• Any pages that contain a “Share on Facebook“ button or simply a ”Like” button.

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• Your credit card numbers.
• Your political preferences, and especially those comments you made that could be used against you.
• Your face: when someone tags you in a photo, Facebook enters this into its database in order to more accurately identify your face in subsequent photographs.

If reading this makes you want to shut down your accounts on social media, you should know that even taking this step won’t mean that your personal data is wiped from their databases. In fact, it’ll stay there forever. But the point is, you don’t need to leave the building where all of humanity lives. You just need to know how to behave more carefully, as we’ve written about here.

Illustrator: Yekaterina Ragozina for BrightSide.me