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Facebook is giving users more details about the data it collects about them and how they are used.
The company is updating its “Access your information” feature, first launched in 2018, to make it easier for users to see their personal information and activities across the site, as well as how they can be used to target ads to them. Here’s what it does – and what doesn’t.
The feature is available for iOS and Android devices now, and Facebook says it will launch on other platforms soon. If you want to see for yourself, go to Settings and privacy> Privacy shortcuts> Your Facebook information> Access your information.
Mobile app users will see eight categories of data when they tap “Access your information”: your Facebook activities, friends and followers, preferences, personal information, logged information, ad information, apps and websites outside of Facebook and security information and login. Most of this data was already available to users, but the update makes them more granular and better explains what that means. Considering that many Facebook users still don’t realize or understand how some of these things work, more transparency is a good thing.
“We want to make sure your information on Facebook is useful, easy to understand and easy to find,” said the company in a blog post announcing the update. “All of these changes were made in response to our own research, which showed us how people already interacted with Access Your Information – for example, the new categories were developed based on what people were already clicking on.”
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Facebook will also tell you how your data can be used to target ads to you (also known as “Personalize your experience”). You could already see this information by clicking on “Why am I seeing this ad?” in the ads themselves, but that puts you in a second place, where the association between your data and how Facebook uses it is clearer. The company also added a search function in Access your information to make it easier to find what you are looking for.
Facebook, along with many other technology platforms, has been trying in recent years to make its data collection practices more transparent and give users more control over them – to some extent, at least. The company now allows users to see how Facebook is tracking them when they visit other sites, as well as to delete that data and prevent Facebook from targeting them with ads based on them. And it became easier for users to see the extent and breadth of their Facebook activities on the platform and to manage them. As a purely hypothetical example, you can easily locate and delete or hide embarrassing photos from the 2009 Roller Derby afterparty that you may not want to be associated with in 2021.
But you still can’t figure out exactly how or why you were directed to a specific ad (Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this ad?” Feature always adds the caveat that “there may also be more factors not listed here”), and Facebook will still target ads for you based on your profile information and your location, even when you disable personalized ads. This does not prevent Facebook from collecting this information in the first place. After all, there are limits to what Facebook wants you to know about what it knows about you.
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