SOURCE: Businessinsider
Facebook is a great utility if you want to stay in touch with friends and family, share photos, and see what other people are up to in their lives.
Facebook is a great utility if you want to stay in touch with friends and family, share photos, and see what other people are up to in their lives.
It's free, of
course, but that doesn't mean it comes without a price. If you're using
Facebook, you're giving the company a ton of information about yourself which
it is selling to advertisers in one form or another.
Most people forget
that when they download an app or sign-in to a website using their Facebook
login, they're giving those companies a look into their Facebook profiles. Your
profile contains a lot of personal information that can often include your
email address and phone number, but frequently also your work history and your
current location. And most people don't realise that if you're sharing any of
that data with your friends then apps used by those friends can see that data
too!
Advertisers,
Facebook app developers, and Facebook ad tech partners don't get a direct look
at your personal data. They won't see that my name is Jim Edwards, my phone
number is 07xxxx, I'm male, and I work at Business Insider - Facebook hashes
and anonymises all the data to protect user's privacy and gives it back to
partners in bulk so they can't identify individuals - but nevertheless, this
data is being used in order to serve you better-targeted ads.
If you're worried
about your privacy on Facebook, you can do two things:
1. Opt out of ad
tracking
2. Look up the list of
app companies that are logged in to your Facebook account, and edit that list.
The second step -
which shows you just how much info you're giving away to companies that you've
probably forgotten about - can be rather alarming if you haven't done it in a while
We'll deal with the ad-tracking
first, as that is easiest.
You can comfort
yourself a little bit with the knowledge that the ads being targeted at you are
coming anonymously and in bulk, at everyone who is in some way similar to you.
They aren't literally being targeted at youpersonally,
even if it feels that way.
1. Click on the down arrow at the far
right of your Facebook page.
2. Go to the
settings.
3. Click on
the Ads button.
4. In each
section of Ads, click on the "edit" buttons.
5. Inside the
edit menu, it will show you how your Facebook ID is used in ads that other
people see. In this hypothetical example, my friends are apparently seeing an
ad for a sushi restaurant that it appears I have endorsed (the ad is triggered
by the fact that I liked the sushi restaurant in the past).
6. This is
easily fixed by changing the option to "no one" and hitting
"save changes." Do this under all the "edit" sections.
7. Now for
the apps. That requires a bit more digging. Go to the "lock" symbol
on the far right of your Facebook page.
8. Facebook
offers this walk-through via the little blue dinosaur, but ...
9. We
recommend taking a deep dive into the settings.
10. Once
you're in the settings, go to Apps.
11. This is
the shocking bit - the list of company apps that are tracking you on Facebook.
Apparently I have allowed 54 apps access to my Facebook account. Be sure to
click on the "show all" button to get the full list.
12. Voila!
The list of apps tracking me is so long I have to make this super zoomed-out
view to see them all.
13. Hover
your mouse over one of the apps. You have options. You can either edit the
app's permissions or delete it completely so that it can no longer access your
Facebook account.
14. TripAdvisor knows my email, my age and - oddly - my work history! I love TripAdvisor. But this feels like a reach.
15.
TripAdvisor is also dredging through my friends' work histories and everything
else about them. Not cool, TripAdvisor!
Review each app to either edit its permissions
or delete its access to you on Facebook entirely. It's a bit time-consuming -
but otherwise you're just giving these people free data.
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