Facebook alone has been running its “Download Your Information” tool since roughly 2018, and most Australians who’ve clicked into it have done so exactly once, usually right before deleting an account in a fit of frustration. That’s the wrong time to do it. The best time to download your data from social media platforms is this afternoon, while nothing’s on fire, so you actually know what’s in the file when it lands.
We get asked about this a lot, usually by people who are either locked out of an old account, worried about a platform’s privacy settings, or just curious what twelve years of status updates adds up to. The honest answer is: more than you’d think, and not always what you’d expect. Meta’s archive includes ad preferences inferred about you, not just posts. TikTok’s includes your watch history, sometimes down to videos you scrolled past in under a second. None of this is secret. It’s just buried three menus deep, which functions as a kind of soft secrecy for most of us.
Why download your data from social media at all
Three reasons, and none of them are paranoid. First, if your account gets hacked, suspended, or you simply forget a password tied to an email you no longer use, a local copy is the only thing standing between you and losing every photo, message and memory attached to that profile. Second, under Australia’s Privacy Act you’re entitled to ask what personal information an organisation holds about you, and while the big platforms are headquartered offshore, most still offer a self-service export because European law requires it and it’s cheaper to build one tool than two. Third, and this is the one nobody mentions: having the file makes it much easier to actually leave a platform you’ve soured on, because the fear of “losing everything” stops being a reason to stay.
We reckon that third point is underrated. Plenty of people stay logged into apps they don’t enjoy anymore purely because deleting feels like erasing a decade of their own life. It doesn’t have to.
Facebook and Instagram (Meta)
Both sit under the same settings framework now, since Meta merged a lot of the backend. On Facebook, go to Settings and Privacy, then Settings, then “Download Your Information” under Meta Accounts Centre. Instagram has the same path via its own Accounts Centre menu, listed as “Download Your Information” or “Export Information” depending on your app version.
You’ll be asked to choose a date range, a format (HTML is easier to browse, JSON is better if you want to actually process the data with a tool later), and a quality setting for photos and video. Pick “all time” at least once, even if the file is large. Meta will email you when it’s ready, and depending on how much you’ve posted that can take anywhere from a few minutes to a day or two.
What’s actually in there: posts, comments, messages, search history, the ad topics Meta thinks you’re interested in, and a log of every app you’ve connected via Facebook Login. That last one is worth reading properly. We’ve seen people discover they’d given data access to apps they deleted from their phone five years ago and genuinely forgot existed.
TikTok, and why it’s slightly different
TikTok’s export sits under Settings and Privacy, then Account, then “Download your data”. It offers a shorter default window than Meta, so if you want your full history you may need to request it more than once, stitching together periods. The file includes your video posts, comments, direct messages, and a watch history log that, frankly, can be a bit confronting. Seeing an itemised list of every video you watched at 1am is a reminder that “for you” feeds are built from granular behavioural data, not vibes.
This is also the account most worth exporting before any account action, because TikTok’s appeals process for suspended accounts can be slow, and a local copy of your content means a ban doesn’t mean total loss.
X (formerly Twitter) and the smaller platforms
X’s archive is under Settings, then Your Account, then “Download an archive of your data”. It’s one of the more complete exports going, including your tweet history, direct messages, and the advertisers who’ve uploaded your contact details to target you, which is a genuinely useful thing to see at least once.
Snapchat offers “My Data” in account settings, though because Snapchat’s whole design philosophy is built around things disappearing, the export is thinner than people expect; a lot of content was simply never retained in the first place. LinkedIn’s is under Settings and Privacy, then “Get a copy of your data”, and it’s particularly handy for anyone job-hunting, since it includes your full connection list and messaging history in a genuinely portable format.
What to actually do with the file
Getting the export is only half the job. We’d suggest three things once it lands in your inbox or downloads folder.
- Store it somewhere encrypted, not just sitting loose on your desktop, because the archive contains enough personal detail (messages, location tags, contact info) to be genuinely useful to someone running a scam if your device is ever compromised. A password-protected folder or an encrypted external drive works fine.
- Skim the ad interests and “inferred” data sections specifically. This is the part platforms would rather you didn’t read closely, because it’s often the most revealing. It’ll tell you what the algorithm has decided about your income bracket, relationship status or health interests, based on nothing you ever stated outright.
- Delete the export from any cloud backup you don’t control tightly, once you’ve reviewed it. Google Drive and iCloud are convenient, but convenient is also how data ends up somewhere it shouldn’t.
The Privacy Act and what platforms actually owe you
Here’s where we’ll be a bit contrarian: we don’t think Australians should treat these download tools as full compliance with the Privacy Act‘s access principle, even though that’s roughly how the platforms frame them. The OAIC’s access and correction rules say an organisation should give you the personal information it holds, in a useable form, within a reasonable time. A JSON file of your own posts technically ticks that box. But it doesn’t include the far more valuable (to them) inferred profile: the hundreds of micro-signals used to rank your feed, price ads against you, or decide which political content you see more of. That data exists, platforms have confirmed as much to international regulators over the years, and it mostly isn’t in the self-service export.
Our take is that the download tools are a genuine convenience and worth using, but they’re also a neat bit of regulatory theatre. They let platforms say “we give users full access to their data” while the genuinely sensitive modelling stays locked in a black box. If you actually want the inferred stuff, in the EU you can lodge a formal data subject access request under GDPR and sometimes get more detail back. Australians don’t have that exact lever yet, though reform of the Privacy Act has been under discussion by the Attorney-General’s Department for a few years now.
Before you delete an account for good
If the goal is actually leaving a platform, not just backing it up, download first, wait a few days, then delete. Most platforms give you a grace period (Meta’s is typically 30 days, Instagram similar) where a deactivated account can be fully restored, so there’s rarely a reason to rush the final step.
It’s also worth checking who else might be affected. If you’re a parent managing a teenager’s accounts under the eSafety Commissioner’s social media minimum age framework, which has required platforms to restrict under-16 access since December last year, downloading and reviewing an export before closing a younger family member’s account is a good way to see exactly what was collected while they were on the platform, and to have an honest conversation about it afterwards. We’ve covered the detail of those age rules separately in our piece on Australia’s social media age laws if you want the full picture.
If identity theft or a compromised account is the reason you’re exporting data in the first place, it’s worth a look at our broader rundown on smart home and IoT privacy in Australia, since the same “what does this company actually know about me” question applies well beyond social apps.
Our take: worth the ten minutes
None of this takes long once you know where the menus are, and that’s really the point. It’s not a dramatic security measure, it’s housekeeping, the digital equivalent of knowing where your passport is before you need it urgently. If you manage logins across the family, pair this with a decent password manager; we’ve written before about how passkeys work for Australians if you’re trying to move away from passwords altogether this year.
Set a reminder, have a crack at downloading your main two or three accounts this weekend, and actually open the files rather than letting them sit in Downloads. The surprising part usually isn’t what platforms kept. It’s how much of it you’d completely forgotten you gave them.
— Em Castellano, Security Writer, Tech Geek
