Facebook launched its long-awaited “Off-Facebook Activity” on Tuesday to its billions of users worldwide and certain disturbing knowledge comes to light.
Apparently, you’re hooked to Facebook even when you don’t want to, all you really need is either the Messenger app or Instagram.
So, if you thought you ditched Facebook because it’s become lame and boring and Instagram is now your favourite pet, jokes on you, Facebook’s still watching.
Take for instance, even with Facebook closed on my phone, I still get notifications about close-by friends. So, Facebook was watching when I opened my Jumia app and cyber-window shopped for a Samsung smart 42 inches TV. It uses all that data from my Offline-time to shape the messages it presents to me across its platforms; FB, Messenger, and IG.
The “Off-Facebook Activity” tracker is designed to give you 180 days’ worth of data collected on you by Facebook from the many advertisers in cahoots with it. The page is buried deep behind lots of settings menu (link here) is a promise fulfilled. At the heights of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised a way to let users see and “clear the history” in their accounts.
The new tool isn’t exactly like clearing your browser’s history and going back to the beginning, No it doesn’t let you reset your history with Facebook, but along with new-found transparency comes with a way to unlink some of the prying eyes from your Facebook account.
A trip into the Off-Facebook Activity will shock or at least really surprise you just how much Zuckerberg’s brainchild knows about you. You probably want to do this check “incognito” and I don’t mean online. Do it privately if you’re not confident nothing you find will embarrass you.
How to see it.
To see what data Facebook is sharing with its inexhaustible list of advertisers simply go to Settings, then Your Facebook Information, then Off-Facebook Activity.
Rivals such as Google don’t offer anything comparable to the “Off-Facebook Activity” page.
“Despite how commonplace this activity is across the Internet, we believe it’s important to help people understand why they’re seeing the ads they see and to give them control over how their data is used, regardless of the services they use,” says Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow.
With the new California, Consumer Privacy Act which requires companies to reveal exactly what data they are collecting about a user, users are being empowered and given control over what data they choose to reveal about themselves and which choose not to.
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