Recently Facebook released a tool called Off-Facebook Activity, which allows you to review and remove data collected by Facebook from other sites. Facebook of course uses this information to help tailor personalized advertising. That’s the most generous explanation of the purpose of this data. Facebook has of course been criticized in the past for its use of user data, and it lax controls over that data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal being the most famous example.
Facebook has had ways for you to look at the data from its own site, which it rightly calls your information (facebook.com/your_information/). You can download your data, although there doesn’t seem to be a way to delete things like your search history. Oddly enough there is a category called Search History, although it doesn’t really show you your search history as much as all of your activity (which pages you liked, which posts you commented on, etc.):
Google has for some years allowed users to manage their browsing data and other related private information (through the My Activity tool), including the deletion of your entire history. Not the most user-friendly tool, there are many different things you would need to turn off to get Google to stop tracking you (and who knows if it really ever does). Things you can delete include browsing history, audio files (use Google Home? Guess who has a recording of everything you’ve ever asked it?), location history (yup, everywhere you’ve ever been while using a Google app), etc. plotted nicely on a world map. Figuring out how to disable everything, and where everything is located is not a simple task. Someone could probably make a good living just helping people scrub their Internet history and prevent it from being recorded in the future. Recently Google even introduced the ability to automatically delete history after 3 or 18 months, although it took me awhile to find that particular setting. Here’s a nice video from Google explaining how they use your data:
Now no one will every accuse Google of being a great steward of one’s person data, but at least they have a way to manage it, and delete it when you want.
Back to Facebook’s new tool. Maybe I just can’t find the way to delete your on-site historical data, but if it’s that hard to find they don’t want you to find it. With this new tool they do off a way to delete your existing off-site data, as well as prevent future data from being recorded, but there’s a big catch.
Facebook, like many large web sites such as Google and Twitter, allows you connect your account to other apps. This could be used as a way of authenticating with a site so you don’t need to give the other site your personal data, or it can be used to connect a specific app to Facebook, such as allowing your blog to automatically add new posts to your Facebook page, or an app that allows you to broadcast video to Facebook Live. When you go to delete your Off-Facebook Activity, or prevent future activity from being recorded, Facebook lists the integrations you have with other apps and explains those will be deleted as well, preventing you from using those integrations. Take a look:
Actually, it doesn’t even say it will log you out of those apps. It says it ‘may’ log you out. What the heck does that even mean? Is there a reason some may log you out and some won’t? What defines that difference? This is basically FUD. Another way to describe this is passive-aggressive. And in case you think it’s a one time inconvenience, what happens if you want to turn it off recording future activity?
That’s even worse. It prevents you from ever logging into another app or web site. So any integration you have with your blog or with an app to live stream or anything mildly useful will now not work. What’s really awful about this is that there’s no reason to connect off-Facebook activity with these app integrations. Yes, you could call app integrations off-Facebook activity, but considering how this will basically kill integrations people have been using for years, you’d think they could separate app integrations from advertising data collected from other sites, or even data collected from sites you’re authenticated with Facebook versus sites that you have not. It’s hard to to look at this and see anything other dissuading many users from deleting their off-Facebook activity.
I’m willing to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt here, since they just launched this tool, and perhaps it escaped their attention that these could be separated. Let’s hope they fix this soon, and allow people to enhance their privacy without having to cripple their Facebook experience. Read more about the introduction of this tool in Facebook’s post Now You Can See and Control the Data That Apps and Websites Share With Facebook, and you can watch a somewhat awkward video introduction where Meera the FB data and privacy team member explains how it works to her husband on the Off-Facebook Activity page.
