Facebooks bad history with privacy and data breaches have been a huge point of concern to individuals concerned with their online privacy. This has seen campaigns like “delete Facebook” go viral on the internet. This has since made Facebook to recalculate its steps.
The social media giant On Tuesday, finally made its “Off Facebook Activity” tool available worldwide after previously introducing it only to Ireland, South Korea, and Spain.
You can access the tool in the settings panel for both the mobile app and desktop site under “Your Facebook Information.”. The tool further gives a little bit of control over your information. You can go directly to the tool by clicking here.
The tool can tell you which companies are supplying Facebook with information about your real-world activity — for example, that you visited their website or purchased a product from it.
It is basically the company’s attempt at a “clear history” button when it comes to Facebook’s tracking of users through internet cookies and computer scripts placed on third-party websites and apps.
Facebook hunts this information so that it can match that information with your Facebook profile and target ads to you
We wrote a brilliant post about this earlier. check it out here
The feature also allows you to opt-out of some of this data collection — to a point. Clicking on a particular company’s listing will bring up a dialogue that will give you a slightly more specific look at what data was collected. There’s also the option to “Turn off future activity” from that company. If you’re looking for a nuclear option, you can click “Manage Future Activity” and then flip the blue switch on the right side of the page.
This seems like it would turn off all real-world data collection, but that’s not exactly true. Right after you flip the switch, you’ll see a dialogue that says, “We’ll still receive activity from the businesses and organizations your visit.” This information just won’t be associated with your account.
You can also delete your off-Facebook activity history by clicking “Clear History” on the activity list. A window will then pop up asking you to click “Clear History” again:
Facebook’s clear off-Facebook activity history prompt
As the prompt says, you’ll still see ads — but they won’t be those creepy ads of a product you were just looking at on a different site.
If you don’t like the idea of your Facebook behavior being tracked and used for ads, you might also (if you haven’t already) want to change your ad settings on Facebook (available in the “Ads” section of your Facebook settings). Turn off “Ads based on data from partners,” “Ads based on your activity on Facebook Company Products that you see elsewhere,” and “Ads that include your social actions.” Again, this won’t completely shut off the tracking, but it will minimize it.
