Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he wants to change the company's mission to focus on privacy.
Topline: Facebook on Tuesday said it will now let users see which outside websites are tracking their activity and prevent Facebook from using that data for ad targeting—a small, but potentially powerful change that could weaken Facebook’s ad tools while making Facebook ads less invasive for users.
- The tool, called Off-Facebook Activity, shows users a summary of the information other apps and websites have sent Facebook and lets them clear it from their account.
- Users can also prevent any future data from being used for ad targeting.
- It doesn’t prevent Facebook from collecting that data in the first place, but instead keeps it anonymized.
- The new tool will be rolled out gradually over the coming months, starting with Ireland, South Korea and Spain.
It’s unclear whether users will take advantage of the option en masse, since the only way to turn it on is by going to the Settings menu. But even so, the ability to target hyper-specific ads to users is what makes Facebook so attractive to advertisers. Without that, the company admits it might lose money.
“If this were widely adopted, it would mean less overall revenue for Facebook,” David Baser, a director of product management at the company, told the New York Times. “And that’s O.K.”
How It Would Work: Right now, if you go to a clothing retailer’s website and click on a pair of pants, an ad for that same pair of pants might show up on Facebook minutes later. By toggling the Off-Facebook Activity setting, Facebook won’t be able to connect your interactions on that retailer’s website with your Facebook account, thereby preventing an ad from showing up on your feed.
Facebook still keeps that data, it’s just not associated with your account.
Key Background: The eerie accuracy in which Facebook can target ads has come under fire as the company deals with criticism of its privacy practices. Ad targeting in particular has become so invasive, critics say, that Facebook has had to deny a prevalent conspiracy theory that it listens to users’ conversations to target them with ads from products they were talking about.
Caveat: If you want to see what Facebook still knows about you, you can download all the personal information the company associates with your account. When the feature was introduced last year, some thought the results were unsettling.
