I Downloaded the Information That Facebook Has on Me. Yikes.

“They don’t delete anything, and that’s a general policy,” said Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, which offers internet privacy tools. He added that data was kept around to eventually help brands serve targeted ads.

Beth Gautier, a Facebook spokeswoman, put it this way: “When you delete something, we remove it so it’s not visible or accessible on Facebook.” She added: “You can also delete your account whenever you want. It may take up to 90 days to delete all backups of data on our servers.”

Digging through your Facebook files is an exercise I highly recommend if you care about how your personal information is stored and used. Here’s what I learned.

Facebook Retains More Data Than We Think

When you download a copy of your Facebook data, you will see a folder containing multiple subfolders and files. The most important one is the “index” file, which is essentially a raw data set of your Facebook account, where you can click through your profile, friends list, timeline and messages, among other features.

One surprising part of my index file was a section called Contact Info. This contained the 764 names and phone numbers of everyone in my iPhone’s address book. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that Facebook had stored my entire phone book because I had uploaded it when setting up Facebook’s messaging app, Messenger.

This was unsettling. I had hoped Messenger would use my contacts list to find others who were also using the app so that I could connect with them easily — and hold on to the relevant contact information only for the people who were on Messenger. Yet Facebook kept the entire list, including the phone numbers for my car mechanic, my apartment door buzzer and a pizzeria.

This felt unnecessary, though Facebook holds on to your phone book partly to keep it synchronized with your contacts list on Messenger and to help find people who newly sign up for the messaging service. I opted to turn off synchronizing and deleted all my phone book entries.

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My Facebook data also revealed how little the social network forgets. For instance, in addition to recording the exact date I signed up for Facebook in 2004, there was a record of when I deactivated Facebook in October 2010, only to reactivate it four days later — something I barely remember doing.

Facebook also kept a history of each time I opened Facebook over the last two years, including which device and web browser I used. On some days, it even logged my locations, like when I was at a hospital two years ago or when I visited Tokyo last year.

Facebook keeps a log of this data as a security measure to flag suspicious logins from unknown devices or locations, similar to how banks send a fraud alert when your credit card number is used in a suspicious location. This practice seemed reasonable, so I didn’t try to purge this information.

But what bothered me was the data that I had explicitly deleted but that lingered in plain sight. On my friends list, Facebook had a record of “Removed Friends,” a dossier of the 112 people I had removed along with the date I clicked the “Unfriend” button. Why should Facebook remember the people I’ve cut off from my life?

Facebook’s explanation was dissatisfying. The company said it might use my list of deleted friends so that those people did not appear in my feed with the feature “On This Day,” which resurfaces memories from years past to help people reminisce. I’d rather have the option to delete the list of deleted friends for good.

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The Ad Industry Has Eyes Everywhere

What Facebook retained about me isn’t remotely as creepy as the sheer number of advertisers that have my information in their databases. I found this out when I clicked on the Ads section in my Facebook file, which loaded a history of the dozen ads I had clicked on while browsing the social network.

Lower down, there was a section titled “Advertisers with your contact info,” followed by a list of roughly 500 brands, the overwhelming majority of which I had never interacted with. Some brands sounded obscure and sketchy — one was called “Microphone Check,” which turned out to be a radio show. Other brands were more familiar, like Victoria’s Secret Pink, Good Eggs or AARP.

Facebook said unfamiliar advertisers might appear on the list because they might have obtained my contact information from elsewhere, compiled it into a list of people they wanted to target and uploaded that list into Facebook. Brands can upload their customer lists into a tool called Custom Audiences, which helps them find those same people’s Facebook profiles to serve them ads.

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Brands can obtain your information in many different ways. Those include:

■ Buying information from a data provider like Acxiom, which has amassed one of the world’s largest commercial databases on consumers. Brands can buy different types of customer data sets from a provider, like contact information for people who belong to a certain demographic, and take that information to Facebook to serve targeted ads, said Michael Priem, chief executive of Modern Impact, an advertising firm in Minneapolis.

Last month, Facebook announced that it was limiting its practice of allowing advertisers to target ads using information from third-party data brokers like Acxiom.

■ Using tracking technologies like web cookies and invisible pixels that load in your web browser to collect information about your browsing activities. There are many different trackers on the web, and Facebook offers 10 different trackers to help brands harvest your information, according to Ghostery, which offers privacy tools that block ads and trackers. The advertisers can take some pieces of data that they have collected with trackers and upload them into the Custom Audiences tool to serve ads to you on Facebook.

■ Getting your information in simpler ways, too. Someone you shared information with could share it with another entity. Your credit card loyalty program, for example, could share your information with a hotel chain, and that hotel chain could serve you ads on Facebook.

The upshot? Even a Facebook lurker, like myself, who has barely clicked on any digital ads can have personal information exposed to an enormous number of advertisers. This was not entirely surprising, but seeing the list of unfamiliar brands with my contact information in my Facebook file was a dose of reality.

I tried to contact some of these advertisers, like Very Important Puppets, a toymaker, to ask them about what they did with my data. They did not respond.

What About Google?

Let’s be clear: Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what information tech companies have collected on me.

Knowing this, I also downloaded copies of my Google data with a tool called Google Takeout. The data sets were exponentially larger than my Facebook data. For my personal email account alone, Google’s archive of my data measured eight gigabytes, enough to hold about 2,000 hours of music. By comparison, my Facebook data was about 650 megabytes, the equivalent of about 160 hours of music.

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Here was the biggest surprise in what Google collected on me: In a folder labeled Ads, Google kept a history of many news articles I had read, like a Newsweek story about Apple employees walking into glass walls and a New York Times story about the editor of our Modern Love column. I didn’t click on ads for either of these stories, but the search giant logged them because the sites had loaded ads served by Google.

In another folder, labeled Android, Google had a record of apps I had opened on an Android phone since 2015, along with the date and time. This felt like an extraordinary level of detail.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On a brighter note, I downloaded an archive of my LinkedIn data. The data set was less than half a megabyte and contained exactly what I had expected: spreadsheets of my LinkedIn contacts and information I had added to my profile.

Yet that offered little solace. Be warned: Once you see the vast amount of data that has been collected about you, you won’t be able to unsee it.

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Trump Says Missiles ‘Will Be Coming’ at Syria. Beyond That Lies Uncertainty.

Two Defense Department officials said the Syrian military had moved some of its key aircraft to a Russian base, assuming the Americans would be reluctant to strike there. Russian commanders have also moved some of their military forces in anticipation of American action.

“You want to hit military targets, military equipment as much as possible, because it’s the Syrian military that’s carrying out these atrocities,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You want to make sure that you deliver a message and that you degrade their military capabilities.”

At the same time, he added, “the risk is, there are a lot of Russians throughout Syria.”

“They’re claiming they have people at every Syrian base,” he continued. “If you end up killing Russians, that risks a confrontation with Russia.”

Mr. Trump said earlier this week that he would respond to Saturday’s suspected chemical attack within 24 to 48 hours. But the move toward military action has slowed as the administration sought to coordinate with allies, including France and Britain.

A joint operation takes longer to organize but would avoid the United States looking as though it was acting on its own.

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain called a cabinet meeting for Thursday, and the BBC reported that she was ready to join a military operation without seeking approval from Parliament, as her predecessor, David Cameron, did in similar circumstances in 2013 only to be rebuffed by lawmakers. Mrs. May ordered British submarines to move within missile range of Syria, according to The Daily Telegraph.

President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is scheduled to visit Washington this month for a state dinner at the White House, has made clear that he is determined to participate in a strike as well. France has warplanes armed with cruise missiles in nearby Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

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Mr. Trump left little doubt about his intention with an early-morning Twitter post on Wednesday.

“Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria,” he wrote. “Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!”

The message conflicted with Mr. Trump’s oft-stated scorn for President Barack Obama for, in his view, forecasting his military moves. “No, dopey, I would not go into Syria,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter in 2013 when Mr. Obama was considering a strike of his own in retaliation for a chemical attack on civilians, “but if I did it would be by surprise and not blurted all over the media like fools.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said on Wednesday that the president was not violating his own policy because he did not give a precise time for the attack to begin.

“The president has not laid out a timetable and is still leaving a number of other options on the table,” she said. “And we’re still considering a number of those, and a final decision on that front hasn’t been made.”

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the United States was still evaluating the intelligence on the suspected chemical attack on Saturday that killed dozens in Douma, a suburb of Damascus. “We’re still assessing the intelligence, ourselves and our allies,” he told reporters. “We stand ready to provide military options if they’re appropriate, as the president determined.”

Few, if any, doubt the American capacity to inflict damage on Mr. Assad’s government. But it remains unclear whether the operation envisioned by Mr. Trump will be any more meaningful than a cruise missile strike he ordered last year after a chemical attack. That strike hit a Syrian air base that was up and running again within 24 hours.

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“The question then becomes, are we just going to try to add additional costs on Assad and see and hope that it establishes a more effective deterrence?” said Jennifer Cafarella, a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “Or is President Trump going to, no kidding, pursue an effective deterrence that holds not just Assad, but his external backers, accountable as well?”

Military operations can produce unintended consequences and diplomatic nightmares.

President Bill Clinton’s airstrikes against Al Qaeda targets in 1998 missed Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and hit a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that turned out not to be the chemical weapons facility American intelligence analysts thought it was. Mr. Clinton’s air campaign to protect Kosovo from Serbian forces a year later resulted in the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

Accuracy of American weaponry has improved since then, but mistakes and limitations remain facts of war.

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In February, a clash in Syria between pro-government forces backed by Russian mercenaries and a largely Kurdish militia that is supported by the United States left an undetermined number of the Russians dead.

Just days later, Syria demonstrated that its air defenses could threaten foreign warplanes when an Israeli F-16 fighter jet crashed after coming under heavy fire, the first Israeli plane lost under enemy attack in decades.

In the last three years, the Syrian military has significantly upgraded its air defense systems, mostly with help from Russia, a former senior Defense Department official said. Although surface-to-air missiles would likely threaten American aircraft in western Syria, those jets would be able to fire cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away, either out at sea or over a neighboring country.

While Syrian air defenses have the range to hit an American jet flying above a country such as Lebanon, the American military could recover the downed aircrew much more easily, the former official said.

With American intentions so clearly forecast by Mr. Trump, the Syrian government has moved aircraft to the Russian base near Latakia, and is taking pains to secure important weapons systems, military analysts said. Russia, too, has had several days now to move key personnel and equipment out of harm’s way.

The United States and Russia still maintain a so-called deconfliction channel between American forces at Al-Udeid Air Base outside Doha, Qatar, and Russian officials at the Hmeymim military base in Syria, a Defense Department official said on Wednesday. The Pentagon alerted Russia before last year’s strike to warn its personnel to steer clear.

If Russians or Iranians were killed in a strike, it is unclear how their countries would react. The former senior Defense Department official expressed less concern about American attacks on the Russians because of the deconfliction line set up but sounded wary about a missile striking Iranian troops or their proxies.

The Iranians, the official said, could easily escalate militarily, by attacking American troops along the Euphrates River in Syria or with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq.

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Pentagon officials said that even if Syrian warplanes eluded an American-led strike campaign, the United States and its allies could still damage airfields across the country to hamper Mr. Assad’s ability to launch future chemical weapons attacks. That kind of damage, though, would require a sustained strike campaign, likely over several days.

Derek Chollet, a senior Pentagon official during Mr. Obama’s deliberations in 2013, said the United States was in a better position now than it was then. After that episode, Mr. Obama dispatched American forces to Syria to fight the Islamic State terrorist group and that experience, Mr. Chollet said, has benefited the United States.

“We have a much better sense of the threat picture, about Syrian antiaircraft defenses and targeting because for four years now we have had people picking targets in Syria,” he said. “Now, those were ISIS targets, but our knowledge of the terrain is so much greater.”

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