How To See What Facebook Knows About You?
Facebook is a social media platform that exists for ages. There’re generations that grew up posting images, sharing videos, meeting people, and shopping for goods and services on Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook proved itself to be a friendly business environment as well. Many businesses developed and grew thanks to Facebook’s advertisement and sales services.
All in all, it is safe to say that the tech giant made revolutionary changes that greatly influenced and changed people’s habits and behaviors.
Besides the benefits and advantages Facebook provides, the platform gathers a huge amount of data and information on its users. Facebook publishes different, personalized content such as ads that should interest its users. But because of the incredible content relevance users see on Facebook, many became concerned about the question of what does Facebook knows about them?
In this post, we will show you how to find out what Facebook knows about you.
Facebook is tracking your most recent activity
When users first create their Facebook account they enter personal information such as email address, first and last name.
There are also options for writing down information like education, location, work, relationship status, short bio, and even an option for adding links to other social media platforms. These options can be seen from your personal account directly.
However, there is more data that Facebook tracks, and it’s not manually entered by the users.
To get a sense of what Facebook knows about you first click in the top right corner, click on “Settings and privacy”, click on “Settings”.
Here you will the settings page that has tons of options, that you might be familiar with.
From your left-hand menu click on “Your Facebook information”.
Here you can see a few sub-sections that have a brief explanation beneath them.
If you click the “View” button under “Access your information” you will see that Facebook is tracking your recent activity, your location, and friends you have recently added. You can also see a small part that explains how Facebook is using your information.
Check out: How to make Facebook private.
Facebook is tracking your off-page activity
Another thing Facebook keeps track of is your Off-page activity.
Have you ever googled something and an ad “magically” appears on your News feed?
Well, this is due to the fact that Facebook tracks your activity outside of the platforms. Companies share your data with Facebook, and then the social network uses this data to show you ads on your Newsfeed.
To access your off-page activity click on “Settings and privacy”, click on “Settings, From your left-hand menu click on “Your Facebook information, and choose Off-page activity.
To manage your off-Facebook activity click on the option that says “Manage your Facebook activity”. From here you can click on any of the apps on the list and see how Facebook got this activity and it is using it.
You can even manually turn off this feature by clicking on “Turn off this feature”.
Facebook knows your device information
Once users download the Facebook app, the platform has information about their location and what device they use.
This Facebook tracking feature is great if you want to remove a logged-in device from your account if you think you wouldn’t log in from that device again.
Facebook has all the data you have manually provided
As mentioned earlier, Facebook stores information such as place of work, relationship status, likes, religious and political affiliations, everything you might have manually provided as information on your Facebook profile.
What does Facebook do with all this information?
Facebook uses this information to serve its users relevant content, mostly ads. The platform is used by many businesses that try to sell their services and products to you. So the company is making the platform as business-friendly as possible.
Another reason why Facebook is gathering all this data is to improve its own features and to provide a better user experience to its users.
Bonus: Explore how to make yourself appear offline on Facebook.
