This is the only way to stop Facebook tracking you
The scale of Facebook’s data harvesting and tracking has been exposed this year, by whistleblowers and Apple’s privacy crack down. Now Facebook has been rated “the worst company of the year” in a new survey. If all this makes you want to stop the social media giant tracking your activity, be warned, it’s harder than it seems.
Much of Facebook’s tracking takes place behind the scenes. We have already exposed its continued location harvesting when users disable location tracking on both the platform and their app settings, and for using its apps to constantly track phone movements without any warning to affected users.
Apple’s privacy innovations have brought increasing scrutiny to Facebook’s spider’s web of trackers that follow users across apps and websites. This “Off Facebook Activity” is a harmless sounding description for a nefarious ecosystem that embeds trackers behind third-party apps and websites as they profile users.
It’s this type of tracking that has been most firmly in Apple’s sights—primarily because it’s hidden and secretive by its very nature. The huge hit Facebook has taken to its revenues and advertising machine have been a powerful indicator as to just how exposed we all are by the ad-oriented web and app ecosystems we rely on.
Facebook offers a range of options to curtail this tracking, including disabling “Off Facebook” activity tracking, denying app tracking permission on your Apple devices, checking permission settings whether you’re on Android or iOS and restricting your browser permissions to disable tracking cookies.
But as we’ve shown before, just changing settings doesn’t kill all this tracking. Using Facebook’s own apps and websites, engaging with the social media platform itself, using Messenger or Instagram or even WhatsApp (to a much lesser extent) will continue to build your profile, adding daily activities into the mix.
And so, millions of users are now going further, deciding that it’s better to stop using Facebook altogether, to safeguard their privacy and banish all this tracking from their online lives. And if that’s the case, Facebook offers two options.
You can “deactivate” your account, giving you the option to regain access to your friends and other content if you change your mind in the future, albeit your profile will disappear from view, and you’ll lose access to your account while it’s deactivated.
The more brutal approach is to “delete” your account entirely, an irreversible step that will permanently delete “your profile, photos, posts, videos and everything else you've added.” And if you use Facebook to access other services, Oculus for example, then you risk losing everything there as well.
Given the stark nature to this deletion, many users opt to deactivate their accounts instead, assuming that this cryogenic state will protect their privacy while keeping years of historic data intact should they ever change their minds.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. From a privacy perspective, deactivating a Facebook account is fairly pointless. Facebook will continue to build your profile, to associate any tracking with your identity, to harvest your Off Facebook activity, just as though you hadn’t made any changes at all.
Whether your Facebook account is active or deactivated, the platform is tracking you. And while there are settings you can change, the onus is on you to delve into each of those options to ensure that you disable the ones that matter, this despite being told at every step why such tracking is beneficial to you. In reality, Facebook knows that most users will not bother to change settings hidden behind multi-layered menu options.
Apple’s game-changing innovation this year has been to simplify such privacy choices for its own users—do you want to be tracked, yes or no? Facebook, Google and others who live off the algorithmic revenues from such tracking do nothing of the sort.
Imagine those platforms offering one simple toggle—tracking, yes or no? Imagine if regulators enforced such a privacy choice, negating the need for users to select the right OS, the right browser, the right app privacy settings, the right platform tracking settings, the right location permissions, etc, etc, to deliver that single result. It’s almost as though, despite all the privacy virtue signaling, it’s still deliberately difficult.
If you do want to stop Facebook’s tracking, you have two options. You can clear your Off Facebook history and disable future Off Facebook tracking, as well as checking permissions for apps and services provided by Facebook itself, and then you can deactivate your account; or, much more simply, you can delete your account, which purges the profile at the center of all this tracking and gives you a fresh, clean start.
If you do schedule your account for deletion after 30 days, then you’ll need to ensure you don’t accidentally log back in through a Facebook site or app or somewhere else associated with your Facebook credentials. That can stall the process and then you’ll need to go right back to beginning, and start the deletion over again.
Source: Forbes
