Recall the early Facebook, where your religion, sexuality, politics, and hometown were prominently displayed under your profile picture. Remember joining groups or delcaring your interest in a particular topic? Do you remember removing it?

I recently moved, and I logged on to Facebook to update my current city. This is publicly available information anyway, so I don’t really have any qualms with benfitting my friends and family by telling it (generally) where I live. But, I also noticed a few things I had completely forgotten about: my relationship status, education, a few books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, places I’d geotagged myself at – all of this is still readily available, but some of it has been decently obfuscated by Facebook’s numerous redesigns and reorganizing of content/information.

I think it’s obvious that this is an issue, and it feels kind of sneaky. I went though a couple profiles that I felt were overall more engaged with the platform than I am (historically and presently) and found a few things that were relatively benign, but probably something they would consider removing if they remembered it was ever there. All of those groups you joined weren’t deleted, and instead now live buried deep in the all-encompassing “likes” section.

A lot of us willingly over-shared facets of our lives that we’d now rather keep away from Facebook, or maybe some of that stuff was just embarrassing. It’s a shame that some of this stuff gets shuffled around until it’s ultimately forgotten; to the right actor, it has value. Maybe take a deep dive and un-like that edgy joke group you joined in high school, too.