Can “off Facebook Activity” access bank accounts & email? Fact Check

A message claims that since a recent update, Facebook has a new feature called “Off Facebook Activity” that can, amongst other things, track your bank accounts, emails and apps.

The message then goes on to implore readers to disable the feature.

MOSTLY FALSE

An example of the message can be seen below.

**OFF FACEBOOK ACTIVITY**
Since Facebook updated last night, they now have a feature where they can track all “Off Facebook Activity”, bank accounts, email, apps, etc. To turn it off go to your Facebook Settings, Scroll down to “Off Facebook Activity”, then click “Clear History” Next click “more options” and turn off “future activity.”

The message is describing a genuine feature on Facebook, but makes incorrect claims about the feature’s capabilities. The message also falsely claims that this feature has existed since “last night”.

Yes Facebook has a feature called “off Facebook activity”. This is the name that Facebook has given to the plethora of information that Facebook collects about you from sources outside of Facebook. It’s worth noting that Facebook has collected information about its users for many years, only now it’s been given the label “off Facebook activity”.

The information Facebook collects from you comes from third party websites that share certain information about their customers with other companies. For example, a shopping website may record information such as your name, your email, what type of device you have, whether you logged into their app, added something to a wishlist or what you purchased from their website.

Sponsored Content. Continued below...

That information could be shared with Facebook, and if “off Facebook activity” is enabled, Facebook can use that information to try and match it with one of their own users. If Facebook finds a match then they will likely show their user adverts related to that purchase, known as targeted advertising. And yes, “off Facebook activity” can be disabled, meaning you won’t see targeted advertising using this method (though you may still see targeted adverts based on other avenues, such as your on-Facebook activity.)

But this message is also misleading.

Firstly, it’s not from an update “last night”. Facebook has been collecting information about you outside of Facebook since its early days. It added the label “off Facebook activity” and the ability to disable it back in early 2020.

Secondly, the claim that “off Facebook activity” can access your bank accounts or your email is false. Facebook receives information about customers for the purposes of presenting them with relevant adverts, which is how Facebook makes money. However there is no mention in any of Facebook’s terms of services, or the terms of services of any bank we’ve looked at, that indicates any sensitive financial information such as bank statements is being shared with the social networking platform, nor the contents of your email inbox.

In fact, in Facebook’s Business Tools terms of service (Business Tools referring to the collection of Facebook technologies concerned with third party companies sharing data with Facebook) they prohibit the sharing of “sensitive information –

You will not share Business Tool Data with us that you know or reasonably should know is from or about children under the age of 13 or that includes health, financial information or other categories of sensitive information (including any information defined as sensitive under applicable laws, regulations and applicable industry guidelines).

And finally, while you can disable the “off Facebook activity” feature, it should be noted that this doesn’t prevent Facebook receiving the same information about your off-Facebook life. The same information is received by Facebook, but when the off-Facebook activity option is disabled, Facebook aggregates this information (i.e. makes it anonymous) so it isn’t associated with your account. From their webpage about off-Facebook activity –

Does disconnecting my activity mean it’s deleted?
The information you disconnect will no longer be connected to your account. This data can still be used without being linked to an individual user to allow us to let businesses know how their website, app or ads are performing.

We’re previously written about Facebook’s off-Facebook activity tool and how to disable it here.