It must have happened to you at the point when you searched for a watch on a shopping application and the following thing you experience is precisely the same advertisement on your Facebook channel. This isn’t witchcraft however a profound mix among applications and administrations that permit Facebook to learn about your preferences from your activity on other apps. Fundamentally, organizations like Spotify, Zomato, Airbnb, et al incorporate Facebook SDK in their applications and report your action history to Facebook — your music inclinations, food decisions, location data, and so on.
Facebook calls these data “Off-Facebook Activity” and targets users with personalized ads and services by utilising it. If you want to stop Facebook from accessing your activity history collected from other apps then you have come to the right place. Here, we are going to show you how to remove your Off-Facebook Activity and disable the feature permanently. So, let’s now go through the guide.
Remove Your Off-Facebook Activity
- On Android and iOS Devices
1. Open the Facebook app on your Android or iOS device and move to the hamburger menu at the top-right corner. Here, expand “Settings and Privacy” and open “Settings”.
2. Now, scroll down to “Your Facebook information” section. Tap on “Off-Facebook Activity“.
3. Once you are here, tap on “Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity”. On the next page, you will find all the third-party apps that have reported your activity history to Facebook. Now, tap on “Clear History” and it will remove all your Off-Facebook activity collected from other apps.
4. In case, you want to permanently stop Facebook from using data collected from third-party apps for any purpose then tap on “More Options” and open “Manage Future Activity”.
5. Now, disable the toggle for “Future Off-Facebook Activity”. That’s it. Keep in mind, while this stops Facebook from using your data for ad personalization and other purposes, third-party apps will still report your activity to Facebook.
- On The Web
1. If you use Facebook on the web then you can simply open the Off-Facebook Activity page by clicking on the link. After that, click on “Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity”.
2. On the next page, click on the “Clear History” button and you are done. It will delete all your off-Facebook activity collected from third-party apps.
3. You can also click on “Manage Future Activity” and turn off the toggle to permanently disable Facebook from using third-party data.
Stop Facebook from Collecting Your Activity History from Third-party Apps
So that is how you can remove your Off-Facebook activity and prevent Facebook from utilisin your personal preferences. For me, it’s appalling that so many major apps regularly send activity data of their users to Facebook without active consent. I hope someday companies will remove Facebook SDK altogether from their apps.
