Facebook marked Data Privacy Day Tuesday with the long-awaited global release of its Off-Facebook Activity tool.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the tool, initially known as Clear History, at the social network’s F8 developers conference in May 2018, and it began rolling out the rechristened Off-Facebook Activity tool last August in Ireland, South Korea and Spain, doing so gradually in order to make sure that everything was working properly and it was ready for global release.
Zuckerberg said in a Newsroom post Tuesday, “Other businesses send us information about your activity on their sites, and we use that information to show you ads that are relevant to you. Now you can see a summary of that information and clear it from your account if you want to. Off-Facebook Activity marks a new level of transparency and control. We’ve been working on this for a while because we had to rebuild some of our systems to make this possible.”
Over the next few weeks, people on Facebook will begin seeing prompts encouraging them to use the social network’s Privacy Checkup tools to review their privacy settings.
Zuckerberg wrote, “This makes it even easier to adjust who can see your posts and profile information, strengthen your account security by turning on login alerts and review the information you share with applications you’ve logged into with Facebook.”
He concluded, “You should be able to easily understand and manage your information, which is why strengthening your privacy controls is so important. We’ll have more to share as we continue to make progress on this important work in the decade ahead.”
