What "private" means here
The exporter only captures what you can already see while logged in. That includes:
- Friends-only posts on your own timeline.
- Posts from friends whose audience you\'re part of.
- Closed groups you\'re a member of (the most common use case — community moderation).
- Secret groups you\'re a member of.
- Your own page or co-managed pages\' private posts.
It does NOT bypass Facebook\'s privacy model, see deleted comments, or read posts in groups you have not been admitted to.
Why a browser extension
Facebook\'s Graph API stopped serving private-group and friends-only post data to third parties years ago — the 2018 Cambridge Analytica fallout closed those endpoints. The exporter runs as a browser extension that uses your already-logged-in Facebook session to fetch what\'s rendered on your screen, then formats it as Excel/CSV/JSON. Your auth cookies never leave your browser.
Common workflows
- Closed-group community moderation — pull weekly comment exports for triage, sentiment classification, and rule-violation review without scrolling through Facebook\'s slow native UI.
- Group-membership audit — over time, build a roster of who\'s actually engaging vs lurking; useful before pruning a 10k-member group down to active participants.
- Reaction-type analysis — Facebook\'s 6 reaction types (Like, Love, Care, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry) carry sentiment information the API doesn\'t expose. Export to count them per post.
- Brand-page private campaigns — for co-managed Pages running invite-only events, export attendee comments and reactions to share data with partners without sharing the login.
- Personal-history archive — back up your own friends-only posts before deleting an account or migrating away from Facebook.
- Closed-group giveaway picker — run a private giveaway in a closed group; export comments and pick a winner with the same fairness standard as a public draw.
Plan limits
Per-private post size scales with your plan. Free (no signup): up to 100 comments per private post. Personal: 5,000. Premium: 50,000. Business: 250,000 — see pricing for the full feature comparison and API tiers for the API-specific limits.