A message on social media claims that Facebook has, for the last 8 weeks, been monitoring what users do when they’re offline and not on Facebook. The message also claims users can turn off this off-Facebook tracking with a new feature called “Off-Facebook Activity”.
An example of the post can be seen below.
Are you aware of a new feature that Facebook added since the February 1st update?
Many of you probably don’t know that over the past 8 weeks Facebook has been monitoring and tracking what you do when you’re offline and not on Facebook.
I suggest you to look now as you won’t believe what they see. To see what they are seeing, go to Facebook settings, scroll down to Your Facebook Information.
Click on Off-Facebook Activity. You can see the list in Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity.
To shut it down . . . in the same setting, click on ‘More Options’ Go into Manage Future Activity and turn it off.
You may want to clear the history as well”
I copy and pasted this from a friends profile.
The message describes a genuine feature on Facebook, but also contains inaccurate and misleading information.
Firstly, it is true that Facebook has recently introduced an “off-Facebook Activity” tool. We have previously discussed it here. The tool allows users to see where Facebook gets information about them from websites and apps outside of Facebook, and [to an extent] what that information is.
Facebook users can also use this tool to “disconnect” their account with the information that Facebook has received about them from other websites, as well as “disconnect” information Facebook already has about them from other websites. The instructions on using the tool in the message above are rather vague, but we have full instructions here.
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However, the message fails to fully explain what disabling the “off-Facebook Activity” feature does. If a user does disable this feature, it is important to note that Facebook does still receive information on their off-Facebook activity from other websites. However, that information is now made anonymous since it has been disconnected from a user’s account. And since it is disconnected, it should no longer affect the adverts a user sees on the platform.
The message also inaccurately states that “over the past 8 weeks Facebook has been monitoring and tracking what you do” outside of Facebook. Actually, that’s not true, since Facebook has been tracking users for far longer than that. We have discussed a number of times on this site about Facebook’s omnipresent presence and their ability to track users even when they’re not on the social networking platform. It seems that because this oversight tool is new, then people have mistakenly believed that Facebook’s off-site tracking is also new, but that is most definitely not the case.