Facebook’s Newest Way to Track You in Texas is Easy to Turn Off

(Jacksonville, Texas) - Anytime you go to a website, you are being tracked. Take Google for instance, you go there to search for a new watch to buy for yourself. You leave Google and go to another website or watch a video on YouTube and you're hit with an ad for the watch you were searching for.

This is done by electing to accept the Cookies from the site your visiting. Your search information is then attached to your online activity and you start getting those advertisements. Yes, it's an attempt for a company to make money. Facebook is one of those apps many of you use. They have a way to track your data that can easily be turned off.

Facebook and Data Tracking

Facebook faced some backlash from users and had to go in front of Congress a few years ago because of a data collecting practice that went too far. This caused Facebook to have to inform you exactly what data they were collecting and allow you to download a file showing the data the social media giant collected from you.

If you downloaded that file, you saw that basically everything you typed and almost every photo you shared, whether on Facebook, or sent through Facebook messenger, was saved even if you deleted it. Scary stuff for a lot of people.

There is a new feature on Facebook called Link History. In the background of the Facebook app is a web browser that tracks the sites you visit on your phone. This will allow Facebook to send targeted ads to you through the app as you're scrolling through your feed.

If you didn't know, Facebook is more than just Facebook, the company, known as Meta, also owns Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp and Quest VR. That collected information is used in all of those products to send you targeted ads (KETK).

How to Turn it Off

As is pretty much required nowadays for any legitimate online company, the ability to have information collected is left up to you and can be turned off. Same for the Link History feature of Facebook. You may have gotten a prompt after opening the app telling you what was going on and if you wanted it on or off. If you haven't, you can still turn it off.

The catch is that it can only be done through the Facebook app on your phone. It takes less than 2 minutes to do and will put your mind at ease knowing Facebook won't be collecting as much data from you as before. If you want some more details about how to turn it off, go to facebook.com/help/.

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