New Tool Lets Facebook Users Reclaim Privacy, Limit Data Collection

Following a string of recent data and privacy scandals, Facebook has tried to educate users about how they can control their own information. However, the activist group Citizens Against Monopoly wanted to take this idea several steps further. That’s why it introduced a new step-by-step guide this week called “I’m Not Your Product,” which walks users’ through how to opt out of Facebook’s ad targeting and surveillance measures.

Citizens Against Monopoly wanted to create the guide (which comes in the form of an app called FB Purity) because of how difficult Facebook makes it for users to exert control over their privacy. According to the group, users need to visit 11 different areas of Facebook’s user preferences, limit seven different actions to friends-only, and more, just to opt out of ad targeting. And even after all that, ads still aren’t completely gone.

“Facebook claims to be really sorry about these bad actors manipulating their platform,” said Sarah Miller, director of the group. “But Facebook isn’t going to want to make it easier to opt out. That would fundamentally affect their business model.”

Even though Facebook claims that user privacy is one of its highest priorities, tools like this one show that there’s so much more the company could do to protect us if it really wanted to.