Delete Facebook activity history and block data collection from external sites

Anyone who thinks that being outside of Facebook is safe from its greedy data collection is truly deluded! Facebook’s activities, in fact, not only take place within its application or website, but are also on any other site, if this has an interactive “Like” button or within which the so-called “Like” button is present. Facebook Pixel “, a tracking code that only works to collect visitor statistics.
Basically, after logging in to Facebook, every website you visit and which has a connection with Facebook’s data collection (practically all sites except “titleonly”), can know who we are and which sites we like to visit. An example of how this data collection works is the following: If Claudio searches for or buys a mobile phone on Amazon, Amazon shares with Facebook the search or purchase made which is saved in Claudio’s account. At that point Facebook will be able to show Claudio the advertising for that mobile phone or even for other similar ones.
The news these days is that, after years of controversy, Facebook finally offers the possibility of check the data collected by websites, outside Facebook, to block this data collection or to delete the activity history.
Facebook is now allowing users to see the data it collects from non-Facebook apps and sites thanks to a new settings menu called “Activity outside of Facebook“which is pretty accurate. You can also remove the association between the data Facebook has about us with data it receives from external sites, even if you cannot permanently delete the data.

READ ALSO: How Facebook controls us, it knows us and knows what we do

To see the activities outside Facebook it is possible to go to the Settings, both from the website and from the smartphone app. In the settings, go to section Your information on Facebook and then click on View next to the writing Activity outside of Facebook
To do this you can also click this link https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/.
After reading the explanation of what this means, you can click on one of the links under the section Here’s what you can do:

• Manage activities outside of Facebook, allows you to see all the sites and apps we have used in the past few days, who have registered the visit or use on Facebook. If you surf a lot on the internet you will really notice many websites, in my case there are 800. By clicking on one of the sites you can see how many times we have interacted with it and what data our Facebook uses. In most cases, these are display statistics used to personalize a site’s advertisements and show ads that may be of interest to the visitor, based on their online activities.
  On this page, you can tap or click Access your information to see what information on your profile is and find out, under the About you section, how you are classified by Facebook based on your internet browsing habits or based on the use of apps on our smartphone.
  The list of sites that have access to our Facebook data can also be downloaded.
  Both on the website and on the app, you can press the button at the top Unlink activity to clear the list of sites and apps that have our data.
• Unlink activities is the key for clear the history of sites and apps that have shared our Facebook activities. It is important to note that the history of the sites and apps that Facebook has collected will not be deleted, but will be disconnected from the account. After disconnecting the activities, Facebook will still continue to collect data on external sites, so the list will return to populate day by day. By disconnecting the Facebook account, some sites may ask to log in again, if the login was made via a Facebook account.
  My advice is to immediately use the button to unlink all activities, as it would be the first time.
• By expanding the other options below the section What can you do you can see the links for view the information Facebook collects about us, to download this data and then also the button for choose how to manage the future business.
  Here is perhaps the most interesting tool in this presets, the one for block data collection from external sites and apps. If you want to deny Facebook the ability to track and associate activities on websites with our account, thus making the collection of data about us anonymous, you can disconnect all activities outside Facebook. If you disable the activity outside Facebook option, you will no longer see personalized ads. The only drawback of this option is that if you deactivate the activities outside Facebook you will also be denied the possibility of accessing the sites through the Facebook account, which in some cases can be important to do.

If we do not want Facebook to use third-party data and associate it with our account and we are not interested in logging into websites via Facebook account, then you can delete the complete history and deactivate future activities without problems.

READ ALSO: Prevent Facebook from looking at the history of visited sites