Facebook Now Lets You Control Data That It Gets From Third-Party Apps and Sites

Facebook is soon going to give you control over your data around the web. As you may already know, Facebook gets a lot of data from third-party websites and apps which it then uses for advertising. The company does this by getting data on what content/products you are looking at outside of Facebook, and then uses that data to promote things related to that.

Soon, however, Facebook will let you see where it gets the data from, who sends it to them, and it will even let you delete those data from Facebook’s servers. What’s more, you will be able to stop Facebook from collecting future data like that from third-party sites and apps.

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Facebook has launched a website describing this type of data, which it calls Off-Facebook Activity. The idea is that this new Off-Facebook Activity section within Facebook will let you see your activity on other apps and sites that were sent to Facebook, and give you control over that data.

The company says this new feature “could have some impact” on its business since it would affect the company’s ability to advertise more relevant products and businesses to you, but it says it believes “giving more people control over their data is more important”

The new feature is rolling out to users in Ireland, South Korea, and Spain to begin with, but it will be rolled out globally in the coming months. The company says it redesigned some of its internal systems to build this new feature, so that kind of explains why it’s gradually rolling out the new experience for users. Either way, I can only see this being actually useful for regular Facebook users who don’t read tech blogs if Facebook actually notifies them about the availability of these new options.

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Conversation 2 comments

  • sabarrett

    Premium Member
    21 August, 2019 - 8:49 am

    <p>Or so they say… Considering all the previous half truths, I wouln't take their word for it.</p>

  • Mark from CO

    21 August, 2019 - 4:33 pm

    <p>And why wouldn't you also let your users control the data they give you directly, if you are letting them control the data you get indirectly? </p>

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