Facebook can track your every move on the web. Unless you specifically ask not to.
You most likely know that Facebook can track you anywhere on the Internet. But did you know that there is a setting to easily disable this behavior? It’s called Off-Facebook Activity, a tool that’s been around since 2019. The latter allows you to see and control what data apps and sites share with the platform, as well as track the type of activity and access to it.
With this feature, you can clear the history of apps and sites that have shared your data. You can also turn on Disable Future Activity to have Facebook unlink all information that a business has shared with your account. Or you can choose one by one the companies you want to stop sharing your activity with so that you no longer see their targeted ads.
How to control which sites are shared with Facebook using the off-Facebook activity tool
With this tool, you can see what information apps and websites have shared with the giant. From there, you can remove them from your account and disable this behavior in the future. You can set this for all apps and websites so they can no longer share your search activity with Facebook.
To get started, go to Settings & Privacy > Preferences, then on the Your Facebook Information tab, click View under Off-Facebook Activity. From here, you can view the activity, delete a past activity, or unlink a future activity.
What happens when you turn off activity outside of Facebook?
Once the activity is removed by the tool, Facebook will remove information that can identify you in which apps and sites are shared. This means Facebook won’t know what sites you’ve visited or what you’ve searched for, so you won’t see targeted ads from those sites.
More options to further protect your privacy on Facebook
If you want to control what ads you see or don’t see on Facebook, go to Settings, then Ads.
There, you can see advertisers who have shown ads to you using your information. If you select a company and click “Hide Ads”, you will no longer see ads for that company.
You can also go to “Ad Settings”and opt out of ads based on partner data, ads based on your activity on Facebook products that you see elsewhere, and ads that include your activity on social networks. However, this will not delete any data and you will still see as many ads as before. Off-Facebook Activity remains the best option for clearing your data.
If you have an iPhone, the App Tracking Transparency feature introduced in iOS 14.5 requires you to grant apps, including Facebook, permission to use your data for targeted advertising.