Have you checked your Facebook privacy settings lately? If you use this social network, the below tips can help limit the way your data is shared. Although, be aware that you may never be able to completely delete the data.
Have a question about Facebook privacy? Share it in the comments below.
From Privacy International comes this worrying bit of information about how apps from the Google Store could be sending data to Facebook even with you logged out of Facebook, please note many apps may also be sending data to other 3rd parties. Also the cut and paste below contains links generated by the email producer and while they should be safe I cannot advise that they are.
" Hello friends,
In December 2018, we revealed how some of the most widely used apps in the Google Play Store automatically send personal data to Facebook the moment they are launched. That happens even if you don’t have a Facebook account or are logged out of the Facebook platform (watch our talk at the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) in Leipzig or read our full legal analysis here).
Today, we have some good news for you: we retested all the apps from our report and learnt that we’ve made some real impact. Two thirds all apps we retested, including Spotify, Skyscanner and KAYAK, have updated their apps so that they no longer contact Facebook when you open the app.
Here’s the bad news: seven apps, including Yelp, the language-learning app Duolingo and the job search app Indeed, as well as , the King James Bible app and two Muslim prayer apps, Qibla Connect and Muslim Pro still send your personal data to Facebook before you can decide whether you want to consent or not. Keep in mind: these are apps with millions of installs.
Luckily, we have some other good news for you: as promised during our talk at CCC, we’re releasing our testing environment so that more people can replicate our work! Many apps we tested, including those that no longer send data to Facebook, still send a shocking amount of personal data to all sorts of third parties. So please do replicate our work (and let us know what you find!)
We’re also doing more: we’ve raised the issue of third-party tracking on apps with the European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor. We’ve written to every single app that still sends too much data to Facebook and asked them to release an update. We also contacted Facebook again and urged them to change the default behavior of the Facebook Software Development Kit (SDK)
Take care,
Frederike Kaltheuner (Corporate Exploitation Lead),
Christopher Weatherhead (Technology Lead)"
As they have released their testing environment Choice may wish to avail themselves of this and run their own tests.
Time to go FaceLess!
I already have. The obvious question is, how does Facebook treat those of us who don’t use its platform? If it permits tagging of photos with our names, then this is a clear violation of my agreement with the company (i.e. I have not agreed to anything).
Which I am one…along with most extended family members. And agree that recognition should only extend to those who chose not to opt out…
I don’t get that option setting.
… blog post from the ‘sugar mountain’ himself …
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 for me personally. Since today is Data Privacy Day, I wanted to share some of the work we’ve been doing to give you more control over your privacy – on and off Facebook.
and
Giving You More Control of Your Off-Facebook Activity
As of today, our Off-Facebook Activity tool is available to people on Facebook around the world. Other businesses send us information about your activity on their sites and we use that information to show you ads that are relevant to you. Now you can see a summary of that information and clear it from your account if you want to.
Off-Facebook Activity marks a new level of transparency and control. We’ve been working on this for a while because we had to rebuild some of our systems to make this possible.
Introducing Alerts for Third-Party Logins
Facebook Login lets you sign in to other apps and services, like games and streaming platforms, using your Facebook account. To help you keep track of your activity, we rolled out Login Notifications earlier this month. These notifications alert you when you use Facebook Login to sign in to third-party apps to help you stay aware of how your account is being used and edit your settings.
You should be able to easily understand and manage your information, which is why strengthening your privacy controls is so important. We’ll have more to share as we continue to make progress on this important work in the decade ahead.
The heading “Giving You More Control of Your Off-Facebook Activity” made me chuckle … and thanks Mark, very kind of you … 
post from ‘on high’ here …
To be fair it definitely gives you more control. You can choose to totally disable cross site tracking if you’d like
At least the appearance of control I guess - the detail is not so implicitly reassuring to me, but like most things in life we will likely never know the actual detail of what is done and how it is done, and certainly not to a level that would satisfy someone technically able to assess and determine the veracity of the methods and claims.
If you clear your off-Facebook activity, we’ll remove your identifying information from the data that apps and websites choose to send us. We won’t know which websites you visited or what you did there, and we won’t use any of the data you disconnect to target ads to you on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger. We expect this could have some impact on our business, but we believe giving people control over their data is more important.
I guess a lot of people will trust FB to do what they claim - not much choice for people who want to use it.
