In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg's company gradually launched in several countries a tool that allows you to delete activity outside Facebook. Now, and as planned, this functionality is being extended worldwide, allowing users to make it impossible for the social network to know about the sites they have visited or what they have searched for and that various data can be used to personalize ads on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
When it launched the new tool in August 2019, Facebook explained that the feature allows the user to access a summary of applications and sites that send information about their activity to Facebook and to clear that data from their account, if desired. This decision comes in line with the letter shared this Tuesday, International Data Protection Day, by Mark Zuckerberg, where he discloses Facebook's goals for the next decade, highlighting the importance of building more effective privacy protections for network users Social.
If a clothing website wants to display advertisements to people interested in a new style of shoes, it is common for the company to send information to Facebook, stating that a particular user searched for that shoe on a given device. If that information corresponds to a Facebook account, the platform can display advertisements about those shoes to that person on the platform.
Now users can access and control the data that other applications and websites share with Facebook. In practice, they now have access to a summary of this information through business tools, such as Facebook's Pxel or the social plugins of the social network and can disconnect this data from the account. Disconnecting future activities outside Facebook from the account in general, or from specific websites or apps, will also become possible.
But what happens if you eliminate activity outside Facebook? Your information identifying the data that apps and websites choose to send to the platform will be removed. This means that the social network will not be aware of the sites you visited or what you searched for, nor will data that the user chose to disconnect to personalize ads on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger be used.
In 2019, Google also decided to launch a new feature that allows users to delete data from their Google account, if they choose, automatically or programmed. Until then, users could delete data, but in a manual format, making it now easier to manage the period you want to delete.