After being launched only to Ireland, South Korea and Spain, the social network finally made the “Off Facebook Event” tool available worldwide. You will find it under “Your Facebook Data” in the settings panel for both the mobile app and the web site.
The tool is essentially an attempt by Facebook to track users using Internet cookies and computer scripts on third-party websites and apps by means of a “clear history.” This data is collected by the social network in order to serve you ads. Nevertheless, Facebook theoretically charts the history of internet use, which can be very gross.
“Off Facebook Event” by the company will show you how difficult monitoring can be. Once you open the tool, you’ll probably see dozens of different websites and applications that have sent Facebook details after visiting or logging in.
Then (somehow) you can block the collection of data. Users will “disconnect” from submitting their data to Facebook a selected website or application. Nevertheless, your social network will still collect information; it will only not be connected to your Facebook ID.
The “clear history” button does the same, except across every website and app. If you select this option, the company warns it will log you out from any third-party apps you used to login to Facebook. The number of ads you encounter on Facebook will also remain the same, they just won’t be as relevant.
Finally, there’s a nuclear option called “turn off future activity,” which will force Facebook to never tie any of the data collection to your account. But again, the company will still collect the data “for measurement purposes.” You also won’t be able to log into third-party websites or apps with Facebook.
“Off-Facebook Activity marks a new level of transparency and control. We’ve been working on this for a while because we had to rebuild some of our systems to make this possible,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Tuesday in announcing the expanded rollout.
In the coming weeks, Facebook also plans on issuing a pop-up to users worldwide reminding them to review their privacy settings.
