Find Out How Facebook Tracks You Even When You’re Not Using It
We all know that Facebook tracks what you do when you use its apps and website, but the social media monolith also collects data from third-party apps, services and websites, even when you’re not using Facebook. This is one of the ways that Facebook targeted ads get creepy and specific and seem to know what you were looking for on other websites.
However, Facebook is now allowing users to see the data it is tracking from non-Facebook sources through a new Off-Facebook Actions menu. You can even share Facebook data about you with data it receives from third parties, but this is not exactly the same as deleting data entirely.
I’ve talked about Facebook external data tracking in previous posts , and most people probably know that logging into a website or syncing an app with your Facebook account means that a company is accessing certain data. This is the first time that users can easily view and manage tracked third-party data, and this is something everyone should check.
How to find and manage your data outside of Facebook
You can find the new Off-Facebook Activity tab under Settings> Your Facebook Data> Off-Facebook Activities . The tab exists in one place for both mobile and desktop users.
The action menu outside of Facebook lists connected apps and websites that are sending data to Facebook, and there are several options for managing that data:
- To have Facebook associate its data with data it receives from a particular app at some point in the future, tap or click it in the list, then scroll down and select Disable Future Activities. You can also use the “Give Feedback on this Action” link to report any issues you may have with in-app activity tracking.
- Download Info allows you to save an offline report of all previously tracked data.
There are also options to separate Facebook data from third-party data and block those connections in the future, if you prefer.
- “Clear History” breaks the link between Facebook data and data it receives from third-party applications and websites. The latter does not go away; it just isn’t associated with your Facebook account as such. (Don’t worry, you will still have your fingerprints online.)
- Future Action Management lets you quickly make radical changes to the way Facebook handles the data it receives from all apps, even those you might sync in the future.
However, keep in mind that even this scorched earth tactic won’t remove ads from Facebook, stop services from sending data about you to Facebook, or stop Facebook from tracking you elsewhere. It simply disconnects your Facebook identity from the information that Facebook has (or receives). While there are ways to manage your ad data to make it more relevant (or less personalized), if you really want to be ad-free, you’ll need the help of third-party tools .