META Meta Platforms Inc

By Jeff Horwitz 

Facebook Inc. said it would start letting users review and dissociate themselves from the data Facebook receives about them from other apps and websites off the platform, a step toward a pledge of enhanced privacy options Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made more than 15 months ago.

The company on Tuesday said it is rolling out a feature called "Off-Facebook Activity" to let users see information apps and websites gather on them and send to Facebook, such as shopping activity, logins using Facebook credentials, or site visits that trigger tracking signals. People will be able to use the tool to prevent that data from being associated with their Facebook accounts -- blocking it, for example, from serving ads in Facebook for a product they shopped for elsewhere.

The new tool has limits. Users can't delete the outsider data that other apps and websites send Facebook. It still will collect that information anonymously -- unlinked to the users' accounts if they choose -- to provide analytics and advertising conversion metrics. And it will not give users the ability to see or limit the full list of data that Facebook gathers from their direct interaction with the company's products.

"They're trying to do everything they can to fly under the banner of privacy and still maintain their business practices" said Ashkan Soltani, a former Federal Trade Commission technologist who focuses on privacy issues. "Providing uses with the ability to delete their information when the infrastructure is built to maintain it all is very difficult."

The feature will be available first only to account holders in South Korea, Ireland and Spain, but will roll out to all users in the coming months, Facebook said.

The move is Facebook's latest response to an uproar over its handling of user information -- including that collected on other platforms. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that some apps were sending Facebook deeply personal information without those users' knowledge, such as users' weight-loss goals or even the timing of their menstrual cycles. As part of its new tool, Facebook will both screen apps for potentially inappropriate data and allow users to report any that slip through.

David Baser, a Facebook product manager who headed the effort, called the new feature "the most powerful and comprehensive tool ever launched in the industry for this kind of data."

Mr. Zuckerberg first outlined plans for a privacy control called "Clear History" in May of last year, amid a firestorm set off by disclosures about the use of its users' information by Cambridge Analytica, a data-analysis firm that did work for the Trump campaign. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook would provide "a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook" to let users "flush your history whenever you want." He said it planned to start with the control over off-platform information, which Facebook said would take it "several months" to build.

Technical obstacles made that estimate prove too optimistic by a year and forced the company to add a number of caveats. A more technical explanation of Facebook's process released on Tuesday morning says that the company found completely deleting information from its data stores would be both slow and unreliable. Facebook therefore created a second version of every account holder's user ID, called a separable ID. On top of that, Facebook also established "measurement IDs" so that advertisers can still track their ad-campaign results.

"We didn't understand all the ways we'd need to work on our own systems to make this tool come to life," Mr. Baser said, adding that, after the company figured out what choices it intended to offer users, it had to figure out how to explain what opting to not allow the use of off-platform data meant.

The new tool won't offer users any new ability to see or limit the information that Facebook collects from them while they are on its site. Facebook already offers some tools to explain why users see particular ads or posts, but those aren't comprehensive -- they don't include, for example, passive signals about users' content consumption, a large category that includes how a user scrolls through content.

How significantly Facebook's off-platform activity changes will affect advertisers isn't clear. The tool prevents advertisers from targeting Facebook advertisements to users based on information it gathers elsewhere. But Facebook has said that, if enough users opt out of associating their accounts with such data, the company's revenue could suffer as its ads become less effective.

"You'll see the same number of ads," Mr. Baser said. "They will be worse ads."

Facebook said it would continue to work toward greater transparency about its data collection and usage, but didn't commit to further actions involving the site's own data collection and usage practices.

"We'll continue to work our way through the list in a reasonable way," Mr. Baser said, adding that explaining how Facebook uses the data it gathers directly "would be ever more challenging to contextualize" than the off-platform information.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 20, 2019 12:18 ET (16:18 GMT)

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