Stop Facebook from tracking your activities with these 11 easy-steps

Did you know Facebook tracks your activities when inside or outside the app? Here is how to stop it and how to delete your activity history.

Off-Facebook Activity in Settings

Stop Facebook from tracking your activities

Off-Facebook activity on desktop view

One sunny day, you open an online shopping app to browse their catalog of portable battery-operated fans. Ending up not choosing to push through with the purchase, you close the app and open your Facebook account. Lo and behold! You scroll down and see an ad of the portable fan you just viewed in your news feed.

Are you in a Black Mirror episode? Not really. It's just Facebook cross-sharing your data with its partner organizations. Should you be worried? As long as you're not doing anything suspicious, then you should be fine.

The culprit behind you seeing ads, of things you've searched on your browser or apps, on your Facebook news feed is Off-Facebook activity.

While Facebook, Google, and the other apps have been gathering your data ever since you signed up, it's only until recently that this has become common knowledge.

Unless you've been living under the rock, everything you do on the internet gets recorded -- though, we don't know who controls nor monitors the logbook. Back to the topic.

To quote Facebook, it's their way of 'personalizing' your experience in the app. In business terms, they're capitalizing on the information they get from you. It simply is marketing; Facebook is a free service after all. While there's no harm in this, it could be somewhat annoying. 

You can clear your activity history

So here's how you can stop Facebook from tracking your activities outside of the app:

1. Go to "Menu" then select the "Settings" Tab

2. Click "Your Facebook Information"

3. Find and click "Off-Facebook Activity"
4. Go to Manage Future Activity (where you will be asked to verify with your password)
5. Input your password and click "Clear History" to delete your activity logs
6. Go back to the previous page, then click "More options"
7. Click "Manage Future Activity"
8. Press the Future Off-Facebook Activity Toggle
9. Press the "Turn off the Future Off-Facebook Activity" button
10. Go back to the "Settings" tab and find and click on "Ad Preferences"
11. Find and click on "Ads Settings" and make sure the options listed say "Not Allowed" or "No one"

You can stop Facebook from tracking you in the future

There are various ways you can go about your information. You can go straight to deleting your Off-Facebook activity. You can download all your information. And you can also manage your off app activities.

By managing your Off-Facebook activities, you can clear your activity history and select which apps or websites are allowed to share your information with Facebook. Or you can also just disable Off-Facebook Activity altogether.

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