What You Can Do About Facebook Tracking

[Bob Of Burleson]

How to Understand the Social Network's Privacy Policy and Take Control of Targeted Ads

By Geoffrey A. Fowler
The Wall Street Journal

Everyone loves to gripe about privacy on Facebook. Like me, you may have even threatened to quit. But let's be honest—we're not going to break up with a social network filled with people we care about.

Instead, let's do something real: Get a grip on Facebook's 9,000-word privacy policy and take concrete steps to control our information.

I'm raising the issue because privacy on Facebook just took two steps forward and one step back. These relate to digital tracking, one of the creepiest and most confusing aspects of the social network.

Facebook is following you. It now can use what you do outside its network—when you surf the Web and use other apps on your smartphone—to target ads at you. Facebook says it needs the extra data to make its ads better.

At the same time, the company is starting to be more transparent. In a first for any major Internet company, it's offering to explain exactly why you're getting every ad you see and to let you control what kind of ads you will see in the future. They don't make these options very easy to find, however.

How should we feel about that? It's classic Mark Zuckerberg, forcing us to accept more tracking of our lives in exchange for some degree of control. Though its Web and app tracking aren't any worse than what we tolerate from other companies like Google, Facebook will end up knowing more about us than ever.

. . .


If the ads you see on Facebook sometimes seem eerily specific to you, that's because Facebook is constantly building out a dossier of your interests, derived from everything you do on Facebook, and (increasingly) things you do off it.

What you can do: You can't stop receiving ads on Facebook—but you can keep Facebook from aiming specific ad topics at you.

For years, you've been able to click on a tiny icon of a down arrow or X in the right corner of an ad to keep ads from that company from coming back. As of late last week, Facebook began offering much more to everyone in the U.S. (and soon elsewhere).

Find an ad and click on the corner icon. (It's tiny, and you may have to hover your mouse over the area to see it.) From the pop-up menu, select "Why am I seeing this?" You'll get an explanation of what Facebook thinks made a good match between you and that particular ad.

Underneath that, there's a link labeled, "View and manage your ad preferences." From here, you'll be taken to Facebook's entire dossier on you.

It's a fascinating and slightly scary view of what Facebook has pegged you as being interested in over the years. Mine has a mix of the spot-on ("Muppets") and the useless ("Atlanta Falcons").

By removing items from the list, you can make Facebook show ads for fewer yet more pertinent topics—more kittens, less online shopping, for instance. You're actually helping Facebook by editing the list, because you're more likely to click on those ads.

If you remove all topics, Facebook reserves three pieces of information that it will never let you keep out of its ad-targeting system: your gender, age and where you live.

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[LibraryLady]

Hmm, then my system is working.

I have created an email address under my Pseudonym that I use over there. She does not search the 'net etc........so, I see no ads on FB.
I also have ad blocker on the browser I use only for FB..
FB keeps telling me that I have not completed my profile.

[GFB]

This stuff is comical.

People join things like Facebook so they can tell the whole world about every aspect of their life.

..then they search out people from their distant past..(that are in the distant past for a very good reason)..and tell them how wonderful their life is and has been.

"Look at me Look at me..I'm special.."

Then complain about privacy.

..strange times.