Facebook Now Tracking Your Activity on Third-party Sites
Facebook has updated their privacy policy to "improve ad quality for its users" which also allows the social media giant to collect data from users even when they are logged out of the Facebook app. This means Facebook will begin collecting data on its users from around the Internet including your browsing history, online searches and other actions on third party sites.
The good news is that you can opt out of the selling of the information to third parties by signing up with a few sites designed to help you opt out with participating advertisers. The sites where you can opt out are:
- Digital Advertising Alliance in the USA
- Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada in Canada
- European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance in Europe.
Be sure to review your Privacy and Ads settings within Facebook to make sure you are not over sharing. According to Facebook, updating on one platform applies to all but it never hurts to update your status on both. There have been some cases of the mobile app still sending notifications once it was logged out and you can bet they're trying to track as much data on you as possible, so use at your own risk.
You can further protect yourself by being picky about the cookies and Javascript you allow to run. As to Javascript and cookies on third party sites, you can use browser plugins like Ghostery, Adblock and ScriptSafe to assist you in not being tracked or served ads from a variety of sites. These plugins basically stop sites from loading all or specific third party tracking javascript or stop cookies from those third party sites from being stored and they all ...
