Facebook Brings Off-Facebook Activity to Everyone

Facebook is bringing its Off-Facebook Activity feature to everyone around the world. The company is announcing a couple of other privacy-related updates in celebration of Data Privacy Day.

Off-Facebook Activity, for those unfamiliar, lets you see your activity on other apps and sites that were sent to Facebook, and give you control over that data.

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With Off-Facebook Activity coming to people all around the world, users will have more control over their data. Facebook is also getting more transparent with Off-Facebook Activity, as the tool provides users with data on how the company gets certain data, and how that data is used.

Facebook also noted that the company is rolling out login notifications for when users use Facebook Login to sign-in to third-party apps.

But more importantly, Facebook will prompt nearly 2 billion of its users to review their privacy settings. The app will show a prompt in users’ News Feed, directing them to the Privacy Checkup tool where they can adjust their privacy settings, turn on login alerts, and review the data they share with third-party apps, etc.

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Conversation 3 comments

  • lightbody

    28 January, 2020 - 10:54 am

    <p>I severely limit my use of Facebook – i use it only on a browser on my PC – I have never used the app (although I do use whatsapp…) use Firefox's "facebook container" plugin, and have never used it for third-party logins, so I will be interested to see what this shows!</p>

    • dspeterson

      Premium Member
      28 January, 2020 - 11:34 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#516282">In reply to lightbody:</a></em></blockquote><p>Make sure to poke around before you limit future sharing, doing that seems to hide/wipe all your data.</p>

  • cnc123

    28 January, 2020 - 2:32 pm

    <p>Just to be clear, changing these settings doesn't let you control your data. Facebook will continue collecting your browsing history and other non-Facebook data. What this does is asks you to trust that Facebook doesn't directly connect this data collection to your Facebook account. Even if they don't directly connect the data to your Facebook account, it's not difficult to de-anonymize data, and the more data there is, the easier it is to connect it to you, whether it's via Facebook or someone else with access to the data.</p>

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