Facebook can see your web activity. Here’s a new tool to stop it

Facebook , in January 2020, released a new privacy feature called Off-Facebook Activity. The tool lets you see and control data that apps and websites share with the platform. It can also monitor the kind of information third-party apps can access.

With the new privacy feature, you can clear the history of apps and websites that have shared your data. You can also turn off future off-Facebook activity, which tells Facebook to disconnect any information that the company has shared from your account. Or, you can selectively choose which companies you want to stop sharing your activity and it’ll stop showing you those targeted ads.

Here’s how to get a better grip on your Facebook privacy.

How the Off-Facebook Activity tool works

Using Facebook, you can see what information apps and websites have sent to Facebook. From there, you can clear the information from your account and turn off future “off-Facebook activity” from your account. You’ll be able to control this for all apps and websites so they’ll no longer be able to share your search activity with Facebook.

To do this, go to Settings > Your Facebook Information > Off-Facebook Activity. From there, you can manage your Off-Facebook Activity, clear all history and turn off any future activity to your account.

What happens when you turn off activity managed by Off-Facebook

Once you clear the activity managed by the tool, Facebook will remove your identifying information that the apps and websites share. That means Facebook won’t know which websites you visited or what you looked at. So you won’t see any targeted ads from those sites.

As the Washington Post points out, however, your data is not deleted, merely anonymized. Thus, even though Facebook receives data, it doesn’t get your personal information.