Hey all, a little Social Media PSA if you have the Facebook App on your phone.
With the last update, Facebook began tracking something called ‘off-Facebook Activity’ which keeps up with all apps and browsing you do off of Facebook and collects that information with the purpose of targeting ads… which means they’re selling it to ad agencies. This includes access to any banking apps on your phone and your spending habits.
Not only is this a major breech of privacy that Facebook didn’t have to tell us about when they updated the app, it’s, of course, automatically turned on.
To turn it off, go into your Facebook app, pull up the menu from the main screen [the button with the three horizontal lines] scroll down to security and privacy, find ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ and hit the button that lets you manage your history to see all the apps it’s been collecting from. From there, you can clear the information it’s already collected, and there will be a button regarding ‘Future activity’ where you can turn the ‘feature’ off, at which point Facebook with give you an ‘ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT US COLLECTING YOUR INFORMATION TO SELL YOU THINGS???’ screen. Yes, yes you are sure. Because this is disgusting.
Facebook made this super hard to find, so I’ve written up instructions for how I got through it (on my app - I don’t know if there are other versions where it’s different):
From Facebook, go to the Menu by clicking on the three horizontal lines on the top right of the screen.
Scroll down to the bottom and select the Settings & Privacy drop-down menu.
Then select Settings (the first option under the drop-down).
This will take you to a screen showing multiple headers with lists of links under them
Scroll down to Your Facebook Information and select Off-Facebook Activity.
The next page has a short explanation of Off-Facebook Activity. Click Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity after the What You Can Do header.
This will take you to a screen with an option to Clear History (which I recommend). To actually turn off this feature, you will have to click the three dots at the top right of the screen and select the Manage Future Activity option that pops up.
This will take you to a page explaining in more detail what they’re doing. Select the Manage Future Activity at the bottom of the page.
THEN you can finally select the toggle to turn off Future Off-Facebook Activity.
If it’s glowing blue with the circle on the right side, it’s active, and if it’s gray with the circle on the left side, it’s off.
Just went and checked this out and yikes on a stick
Yuck. I just did this.