Off-Facebook activity tool, which was initially launched in August 2019 to users in Ireland, South Korea and Spain, is now being rolled out to users worldwide, the CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced.

With the off-Facebook activity tool, users will be able to see a summary of the apps and websites that send their data to Facebook and also be able to clear that information with the ‘clear history’ option. Facebook says that this tool is aimed at increasing transparency on the platform and expands on the ‘why am I seeing this ad?’ and ‘why am I seeing this post?’ tool.

Most of this data emerges from businesses and organisations advertising on Facebook and targeting people by parameters such as age, interests, among hundreds of others. It’s important to note that even if users disconnect from Off-Facebook activity, they’ll still be shown ads depended on their activity on Facebook like liking a business page. However, Facebook doesn’t show users all of the data that the platform receives and says this is done for “technical and accuracy reasons”. The activity that isn’t shown includes things added to a shopping cart or information collected when the user isn’t logged into Facebook, among others.

Review privacy settings with the checkup tool

The company will also notify its two billion users to review their privacy setting via the privacy checkup tool, which was updated earlier this month.

Facebook’s Privacy Checkup tool, which has been available since 2014, was revamped earlier this month with four new topics that are aimed at helping the user understand and control how and with whom they’re sharing their information and how it is being used with the following topics:

Who can see what you share?
How to keep your account secure?
How people can find you on Facebook?
Your data settings on Facebook.

Alerts for third-party logins

In addition to the two updates mentioned above, earlier this month, Facebook also rolled out a feature called Login Notifications, which will notify users when their account is used by login to a third-party app.

Facebook will send these notifications via the Facebook app as well as the email address linked to the user account. These login notifications will be sent when a user logs into a third-party app using Facebook Login and grants that app access to their account information. It will also be triggered if the user logs in via Facebook to an app whose access has expired.“One of our main goals for the next decade is to build much stronger privacy protections for everyone on Facebook. We know we have a lot of work to do here, which is why this is such a priority for our teams and me personally,” Zuckerberg wrote.