What happens to your content when you leave a Facebook group?

I have been on a very interesting journey looking at old Facebook content. The long story cut short, I’ve learned that closed groups behave a bit strangely and break the model that you control your own content. My recommendation for the future is: if you are choosing to leave a closed group, BEFORE you leave, review the posts and comments you have made. If there is anything that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see a few years down the road, delete it. My story and reasons are explained below.

I was contacted by a woman asking for some advice based on a post I had made in a closed group. I was scratching my brain about it because I had left that closed group years ago, so we chatted some more and she sent me a screenshot.

The post which prompted the PM was from more than 3 years ago from a group I had been a part of briefly when trying to figure out if I was going to switch my child’s school. A series of recent comments were occurring under that old post, but since I had long left the group I had no idea and this person finally decided to just PM me.

I wanted to go back see what other posts I had made waaaay back then that may no longer be relevant. For example, I recommended a preschool after participating in our first year which we left abruptly in our second year when it came to light they had a church minister come and read bible stories without disclosing this to the parents. Maybe I had divulged a little more information than I would be comfortable with now given the scope of the groups have changed slightly and the memberships grown. After 10 years of participating on Facebook I wanted to go check.

Tools exist to take a look at your past group participation. You can see *that* you posted or *that* you commented or *that* you reacted (along with *when*) in particular Facebook groups.

But if you have already left the closed group, you cannot see *what* you may have said or *what* the post you commented on said, although you can still see *that* you participated.

You do have the ability to blindly delete *that* post or comment even though you are no longer a member.

So let’s say you joined a small pre-school class group, exchanged email addresses for a birthday party and then a year or two later switched schools. The admin, 5 years later, changes that group to be encompass all members past and present from that school community, now they all have access to your email address.

If you were still with the group, you could do a quick search within the groups section for personal content such as email address and delete those specific posts. But if you have left the group, you have no visibility of your content you cannot simply do a search to determine if you left your contact information in any of your former closed groups.

Is this a problem? In the big scheme of Facebook issues, no probably not. But me being a bit fussy about who owns the rights to the content that I produce, it’s a bit irksome that ownership seems to sit with the group and admin, and I have the right to not view, but only to blindly delete.