“It will be a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook-what you’ve clicked on, websites you’ve visited, and so on,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in May 2018. That lets marketers build ads that play on your interests and emotions.įacebook first promised to give its users a meaningful way to put the brakes on that behavior almost two years ago in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it was revealed that millions of users’ data had been illicitly used for political campaigns during the 2016 election. “What Facebook gets out of all that is data that can be super valuable for targeting ads,” Oppenheim says. Together with countless other details, that helps Facebook generate a comprehensive profile of who you are and what you’re like. The company uses that kind of data to make inferences about you, including everything from your religious beliefs to your political preferences. Those ads for pillows I’ve been seeing? They might have something to do with the ping Facebook got from Bed Bath & Beyond on Nov. It can even tell I’ve been slacking on my Spanish lessons based on updates it receives (or, in my case, doesn’t receive) every time I log into the language app Duolingo. Facebook was tipped off about a night out last Sunday, when I used the payment app Venmo to reimburse a friend for dinner. I read privacy policies and pore through data settings for a living, but even I was impressed by the details associated with my own account.įor instance, I learned that Facebook got 611 updates about my dating life from the app OkCupid. “If you clear your history and turn off future data sharing, these are meaningful ways to protect your privacy.”Īlong the way, you’ll get a peek behind the data collection curtain. “Everybody should adjust the Off-Facebook settings,” says Casey Oppenheim, co-founder of data security firm Disconnect. Then you can also prevent the company from linking such “off-Facebook” data with your account in the future. You can “disconnect” that data from your account using a setting in the menu called Clear History. The new settings are grouped in a menu called Off-Facebook Activity, and they reveal details about data sent to the company over the previous six months. The tools also give you more power to do something about it.
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