Even users with tracker-blocking extensions on their browsers will likely find dozens of instances where companies are sending personal data to Facebook. That’s because a lot of sites use Facebook’s trackers, which automatically collect and send visitor data back to Facebook. Many of the sites on her list were ones she had just visited. One of our reporters, for example, found that 518 apps and websites had shared her data with Facebook in some way: You should see a line for Off-Facebook Activity, and then just go to view. If you’re trying to find it from your News Feed, you’ll need to go to Settings and then click Your Facebook Information. You can go directly to the tool by clicking here. (The play was great, by the way.)Īccessing the Off-Facebook Activity tool to see how much Facebook knows about your life outside of Facebook is not exactly straightforward. So you are getting something out of this deal - you just might not have realized you were making the deal in the first place, or how much data you were handing over. This is also what allows many websites, including Facebook, to give you free services. This in-depth tracking is why you might see, oh, I don’t know, an ad for a play starring the venerable Kate Mulgrew immediately after looking up Star Trek: Voyager episode guides, even if you weren’t on Facebook at the time. A lot of times when you think Facebook is listening to your phone conversations based on how specific its ads are, it’s actually because of how extensive (and hidden) its offsite data collection is. Why does Facebook want this? Because it can then match that information with your Facebook profile and target ads to you (or, in Facebook’s words, “personalize your experience”). It can tell you which companies are supplying Facebook with information about your real-world activity - for example, that you visited their website or purchased a product from it. The new Off-Facebook Activity tool, which the company announced last August, finally launched on Tuesday. If you didn’t already realize it, by the way, Facebook is tracking an astounding amount of what you do when you’re not using the platform, an activity also known as living life in the real world. Facebook users just got a new glimpse into - and a little control over - the myriad ways the social network tracks what they do when they’re not using Facebook.
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