

However, you have the option to find that out by downloading an archive of all your Facebook data. On the off-Facebook Activity page itself, Facebook doesn’t reveal which specific interaction an app or website had filed.
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How to use the off-Facebook activity tool Similarly, LinkedIn, where I spent five minutes responding to a few pending messages last weekend, had somehow managed to log and share 200 such tiny pieces of information with Facebook. I haven’t granted a single permission to Seven, but it knows what sort of exercises I do, and based on that, Facebook can show me health-related ads that suit my specific needs. Plus, the off-Facebook Activity hub highlights the true extent of the lengths that ad companies like Facebook go to to keep tabs on you, and also how they can tap into even the most innocuous piece of data such as a device ID to identify you - regardless of whether you are signed into Facebook.įor instance, one of the apps in my off-Facebook activity is a workout app called Seven. An interaction can be anything from you adding an item to your shopping cart to clicking a link. You can also view how many of your “interactions” they recorded and see the last time their trackers watched you. The list offers a remarkable and nerve-wracking look inside how actively businesses monitor you online. How does the off-Facebook activity tool work?Īs its name suggests, the Off-Facebook Activity page lists down every app or website that has tracked you and shared the information with Facebook. In return, these apps and websites are able to take advantage of Facebook’s business tools that help them understand you and serve you highly personalized experiences. They all collect data and add to this digital profile of you. The social network’s trackers are engineered into hundreds of thousands of apps and websites. Nine years after those remarks, and 16 years after its founding, Facebook is somehow still in the process of going back to basics with its privacy features.But Facebook isn’t the only one responsible for maintaining this database. I’m committed to making Facebook the leader in transparency and control around privacy."

"Facebook has always been committed to being transparent about the information you have stored with us-and we have led the internet in building tools to give people the ability to see and control what they share," he wrote. It also lets you block Facebook from using your browsing history for targeted ads.Īll the way back in November 2011, though, Zuckerberg was grappling with similar issues. The feature provides an accounting of the third-party websites and apps that share your visit history with Facebook and then gives you the option to clear that out. It took more than a year for the tool, Off-Facebook Activity, to finally roll out in August 2019. Midway through 2018, Zuckerberg promised a feature that would let users clear their browsing history from Facebook.

But people also really love keeping a record of their lives." For example, many people who have been on Facebook for a long time have photos from when they were younger that could be embarrassing. "As we build up large collections of messages and photos over time, they can become a liability as well as an asset. "One challenge in building social tools is the 'permanence problem,'" Zuckerberg wrote. "Whether you're entering the job market after college or moving on from an old relationship, we know things change in people’s lives, and we want to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook," the company says in a blog post. The new feature is rolling out in Facebook's mobile apps first. Manage Activity will also introduce a Facebook Trash folder so you can delete posts more easily. The new feature, known as Manage Activity will create the concept of an "archive" on Facebook, allowing you to move any or all of your past posts to a secret new home that only you can see. It may be the most intuitive version of the controls yet, because it's basically what Gmail has offered for email since the year Facebook launched. But today Facebook is announcing a new tool for managing your posts. It's been a challenging project, with plenty of major detours along the way. Throughout its 16 years of existence, Facebook has struggled to provide the privacy controls users really want and need to safeguard the data they post to the platform.
