We already know that if you have a Facebook account, then the company is collecting data about you.

We all reluctantly accept this information as the price we pay for using the social network, and while we might not like it, knowing about it somehow makes it easier to bear.

Sort of – maybe it’s more that going off the grid, growing our own vegetables, and living without electricity sounds like a lot of work and nobody has time for that.

Moving on the latest development in Facebook’s sketchy relationship with our personal data, and this time, it’s going to be harder to ignore.

Here’s the Washington Post:

Facebook is giving us a new way to glimpse just how much it knows about us: On Tuesday, the social network made a long-delayed “Off-Facebook Activity” tracker available to its 2 billion members.

It shows Facebook and sister apps Instagram and Messenger don’t need a microphone to target you with those eerily specific ads and posts — they’re all up in your business countless other ways.

Even when you aren’t using the app, Facebook gets notified when you use another app on your phone, or read a news article.

Facebook explains it like this:

They casually throw in that bit about ‘buying a backpack’ as if that’s any of Facebook’s business.

I checked out my own ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ tracker and the results are pretty terrifying. Facebook has a list of every news site I’ve read over the last 180 days (that’s how much info you can see), and which articles I clicked on. It knows that I ordered Uber Eats, and bought a lottery ticket.

The really creepy thing is that it also made a note of when I logged my period in my period tracker app, which explains the barrage of adverts for pregnancy tests in my newsfeed a few months ago when I was a day or two late.

Yup, Facebook knows when you’re menstruating.

You might be shocked or at least a little embarrassed by what you find in there. My Post colleagues found that Facebook knew about a visit to a sperm-measurement service, log-ins to medical insurance and even the website to register for the Equifax breach settlement.

Even when your phone is entirely off, businesses can upload information about you making an in-store purchase. One colleague found 974 apps and websites shared his activity.

That self-sustaining vegetable garden isn’t looking so bad right now.

This page, buried behind lots of settings menus (here’s a direct link), is the product of a promise CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during the height of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal to provide ways we can “clear the history” in our accounts.

Facebook’s new tool isn’t nearly as useful as your Web browser’s clear-history button — it doesn’t let you reset your entire relationship with Facebook. But along with the transparency, it does give you a way to unlink some of its surveillance from your Facebook account.

Overall, this new feature is a win, because it allows us to see behind the curtain. We can now tell which companies are feeding the social network information.

If you want to fight back against Facebook’s surveillance, here’s what you can do.

The new “Off-Facebook Activity” page includes ways to ask Facebook to cut it out. From that page, click on “Clear History” to tell Facebook remove that data from your account.

If that sounded too easy, you’re right.

After you’ve done that, you still need to inform Facebook you want them to stop adding this data to your profile in the future. On the same “Off-Facebook Activity” page, look for another option to “Manage Future Activity.” (To find it, you may first have to click “More Options” — sorry, I know they’re not making this easy.)

Click that, and then click the additional button labeled “Manage Future Activity,” and then toggle off the button next to “Future Off-Facebook Activity.”

Turning off your ‘Off-Facebook Activity’ will mean losing access to apps and websites that you’ve used Facebook to log into in the past. If that’s the price of privacy, it might be worth it.

For more ways to secure your account, read the full article.

Oh, and Facebook – stay away from my uterus.

Not cool.

[source:washingtonpost]