Those who think that being out of Facebook is safe from their greedy data collection is truly deluded! Facebook activities, in fact, not only take place within its application or its website, but are also in every other site, if this has an interactive “Like” button or inside which there is the so-called ” Facebook Pixel “, a tracking code that only works to collect visitor statistics.Basically, after logging in to Facebook, every website that you visit and that has a link with Facebook’s data collection (practically all sites except How2do.org), can know who we are and what sites we like to visit. An example of how this data collection works is as follows: If Claudio searches for or buys a mobile phone on Amazon, Amazon shares with Facebook the research or purchase made which is saved in Claudio’s account. At that point Facebook will be able to show Claudio the advertisement for that mobile phone or for other similar ones.
The news these days is that, after years of controversy, Facebook finally offers the possibility of check the data collected from websites, outside of Facebook, to block this data collection or to clear the activity history.
Facebook is now allowing users to see the data it collects from non-Facebook apps and sites thanks to a new settings menu called “Activities outside of Facebook“which is quite accurate. You can also remove the association between the data Facebook has about us with the data received from external sites, even if the data cannot be permanently deleted.READ ALSO: How Facebook controls us, knows us and knows what we do
To see activities outside Facebook you can go to the Settings, both from the site and from the app on smartphones. In settings, go to the section Your information on Facebook and then click on View next to the writing Activities outside of Facebook
To do it first you can also click this link https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/.
After reading the explanation of what it means, you can click one of the links below the section Here’s what you can do:
- Manage activities outside of Facebook, allows to see all the sites and apps that we have used in recent days, who recorded the visit or use on Facebook. If you surf a lot on the internet you will notice many websites, in my case there are 800. By clicking on one of the sites you can see how many times we interacted with this and what data our Facebook uses. In most cases, these are display statistics used to personalize the advertisements of a site and show ads that could interest the visitor more, based on his online activities.
On this page you can touch or click on Access your information to see what your profile information is and to find out, under the About you section, how you are classified by Facebook according to your internet browsing habits or based on the use of apps on our smartphone.
The list of sites that has access to our Facebook data can also be downloaded.
Both on the site and on the app, you can press the button at the top Unlink activities to clear the list of sites and apps that have our data. - Unlink activities is the key to clear the history of sites and apps that shared our activities on Facebook. It is important to note that the history of the sites and apps that Facebook has collected will not be deleted, but will be disconnected from the account. After disconnecting the activities, Facebook will continue to collect data on external sites, therefore the list will return to populate itself day by day. By disconnecting the Facebook account, some sites may ask you to log in again, if the login was made via a Facebook account.
My advice is to immediately use the button to disconnect all activities, since it would be the first time. - Expanding the other options under the section What can you do you can see the links for view the information that Facebook collects about us, to download this data and then also the key for choose how to manage the future business.
Here is perhaps the most interesting tool in this set of settings, the one for block data collection from external sites and apps. If you want to deny Facebook the ability to track and associate activities on websites with our account, thus making the collection of data anonymous about us, you can disconnect all activities outside of Facebook. If you disable the option of activities outside Facebook, you will no longer see personalized ads. The only drawback of this option is that if you disable activities outside of Facebook, you will also be denied the ability to access sites through your Facebook account, which in some cases may be important to do.
If we do not want Facebook to use third-party data and associate it with our account and we are not interested in logging into websites via Facebook account, then you can clear the complete history and deactivate future activities without problems.
READ ALSO: Prevent Facebook from looking at the history of the sites visited