The Profile Engine has now been donated to the Internet Archive (31st March 2018)

Having devoted more than ten years of hard work to create, preserve, defend and maintain the Profile Engine, we are no longer able to maintain and operate the Profile Engine website due to other commitments, therefore we have donated the data for the public good. We hope that clones, mirrors and improved versions of the Profile Engine will soon be made available to the public by others. Please let us know if you build a new Profile Engine and we will provide a link to it. Profile Engine has millions of regular users who will be keen to try your new version and we hope this opportunity will spark innovation and people will find creative new ways to search this free, public data.

The files are huge, containing hundreds of millions of profiles with billions of group membership and friend connections. The database files total under 100GB but there are several TB of images too. Please help to preserve them by replicating and seeding the torrents.

Why is this data important?

Knowledge is power and all the power is concentrated in the hands of a malevolent force - corporate Facebook.

We sued Facebook, fought hard in a David and Goliath battle and won a good settlement. One day, maybe we'll have time to tell the whole story - you'd be utterly shocked what goes on inside Facebook - what you've already heard is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a Facebook account, we strongly recommend that you delete it completely, without delay. Learn more about Facebook

We are freely and lawfully transferring this database to the Internet Archive (archive.org) as they have a long track record as a suitable, responsible long term custodian and we have the legal right to do so.

Making this data freely available and preserving it serves many purposes. Here are a few:

* Helping to reunite old friends with powerful search tools (Facebook don't provide powerful search tools because if you have to search through hundreds of pages of profiles then you view more ads than if the tools take you straight to who you want).
* Helping you to find and meet new people with common interests
* Exposing the interests and group memberships of politicians and public figures (What did they really like ten years ago before they were famous?)
* This snapshot of the early days of social networking will be invaluable to Genealogists, Social Historians and perhaps even Archaeologists in ten, fifty or even 1000 years time.
* Most importantly, this will break Facebook's monopoly over social data. People chose to make this data free and public, yet Facebook still charge for it. Not any more!


Please understand that having donated this data to The Internet Archive for preservation and the public good, we are no longer in possession or control of it and therefore we cannot process any form of deletion or removal requests.
Please do not send ay such requests to us

As a historic archive of public data, owned by a charity, our understanding is that this data will be exempt from most data protection laws worldwide, including the new EU GDPR rules. It is therefore highly unlikely that any data removal request to the Internet Archive would be successful.

Please use this data responsibly and respectfully, in accordance with the wishes of the Facebook users who originally chose to make it public and available to search engines.

I could have sold this data to some data broker for a lot of money and it would have been used by those with money for marketing or political purposes rather than freely available for the public good. Instead I donated it for free to the Internet Archive and an suffering financial hardship as a result. Please consider donating through my Patreon page


Profile Technology Ltd has given me the profileengine.com domain names in lieu of unpaid salary and I will consider selling the domain names (profileengine.com etc) to the right buyer if you would like to continue operating the site. It has received over 2 million users per month and has a high google page rank. Please contact business@profileengine.org if interested or if you are building something using the data. Press enquiries please contact press@profileengine.org. Emails on any other topic, especially deletion requests, cannot be processed. Please do not use these email addresses for any other purpose.



If you would like some assistance with interpreting the data or building something using the data then please contact business@profileengine.org. A donation to the patreon page will ensure a faster and more detailed response

Links to all parts of the Profile Engine data on the Internet Archive (archive.org) :