Facebook launches Off-Facebook Activity tool to grant users more control

Facebook receives user activity data from other websites to personalise advertisements.

Facebook on Tuesday launched a new tool to provide its users more control on their personal browsing data which the tech giant is allowed to access.

The "Off-Facebook Activity" tool – which was first rolled out on August 20, 2019, in Ireland, South Korea and Spain – lets users disconnect their identities from their browsing history so Facebook cannot see which websites specific users have visited and what they do on those sites in an effort to improve the social media platform’s transparency.

Facebook will introduce the tool to approximately two billion of its users across the globe “a prompt encouraging them to review their privacy settings” in their newsfeeds, which will then direct users to their privacy settings so they can make personal alterations.

Starting the Decade by Giving You More Control Over Your Privacy https://t.co/X4O2anuMxW pic.twitter.com/gqPUKWLJMl

- Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) January 28, 2020

These settings include an option to use the Off-Facebook Activity tool, Facebook said in a Tuesday blog post.

Facebook receives user activity data from other websites to personalise advertisements.

"Imagine a clothing website wants to show an advertisement to people who are interested in a new style of shoes," Facebook’s chief privacy officer for policy, Erin Egan, and Facebook’s director of product management, David Baser, explained in a blog post. "They can send information to Facebook saying someone on a particular device looked at those shoes. If that device information matches someone’s Facebook account, we can show ads about those shoes to that person."

With Off-Facebook Activity, Facebook won’t know which websites users visit or what they do on those sites and it won’t use that data to target ads to users "on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger,” Eagan and Baser wrote.

The tool was originally called "Clear History" as it was first intended to allow users to completely clear their search history so Facebook would not be able to see it.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced the idea behind a Clear History tool in May 2018, when he wrote in a Facebook post that by using Clear History, users would "be able to see information about the apps and websites [they have] interacted with" and clear that information their accounts completely.

Unlike the original Clear History tool, Off-Facebook Activity does not completely flush user browsing data. Instead, it simply disconnects a user’s identity with their search history.

The tech giant has been making regular privacy updates since it came under fire for sharing data with Cambridge Analytica, which helped design methods for the Trump campaign to influence potential voters ahead of the 2016 election, without user permission.