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SAN FRANCISCO – Facebook has put in place a vast network of tracking technologies outside of its main social network to strengthen its targeted advertising business. This allowed the company to collect information about users' browsing habits, even when they did not use the social network.
On Tuesday, Facebook said it was in the process of changing its data practices.
The company has launched a new tool allowing users to better see and control the information collected by Facebook on their browsing habits outside the social network.
The Off-Facebook Activity Tool allows users to view hundreds of sites and apps that share customer data and information with Facebook. They can then erase the data they want.
"It's another way of giving people more transparency and control over Facebook," the company said in a blog post. He adds that users typically have more than 80 apps on their phone and use about half of them each month. It is therefore difficult to know which ones collected personal information and how it is used.
The introduction of the new tool is Facebook's latest response to criticism of how it protects users' privacy. The issue exploded last year after The New York Times and other media have recounted how a British consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, had collected personal information from over 50 million Facebook users without their permission.
Facebook has since been trying to contain the spinoffs, attracting the attention of regulators and lawmakers around the world. Last month, the company reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission regarding breaches of privacy, agreeing to pay a $ 5 billion fine and altering its management of user data.
Mark Zuckerberg, Managing Director, said the company would develop a technology solution that allows users to clean up their browsing history.
Facebook said it hoped to initially offer an option allowing users to remove the entire repository of data collected by the company on other sites in order to improve ad targeting. But Facebook said his research showed that people did not want such an all-or-nothing option. Instead, Facebook said that users frequently requested better visibility on sites providing data on the company's browsing habits, as well as increased control over how information was shared.
The new tool will not be a panacea for those worried about Facebook's privacy. The company will continue to keep all users' browsing data on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
Yet, by giving Internet users the ability to clean up their browsing history outside of Facebook and its apps, the company takes a risk because of its partial reliance on this information for targeting purposes. advertisements on users. The company said it was ready to deal with the consequences of users' decision to exercise greater control over their privacy using this tool.
"If it were adopted on a large scale, it would mean a decline in Facebook's overall revenue," said David Baser, director of product management for the company, in an interview. "And it's O.K."
The new tool is located in the settings menu of the Facebook application. Once users click on it, they can view the detailed history of external apps and visited websites that shared data with the social network. They can also see the types of data that applications and sites shared.
A user may find that a clothing retailer site has one of Facebook's tracking cookies installed on his or her web page. If a customer has viewed pants on the site and then returned to Facebook, social network tracking technology may have shown this user an advertisement for the same pants in the Facebook app.
In addition to having access to detailed browsing history, users can also use the tool to completely delete historical navigation data or to erase data from individual sites and applications. . The tool also allows users to disable data sharing from all sites and Facebook applications in the future.
Facebook has announced that the new tool will be rolled out gradually in the coming months, starting Tuesday in Ireland, South Korea and Spain.
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