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How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings

These controls and techniques give users a measure of control over how Facebook collects and uses personal data

Facebook’s privacy settings are confusing. Take the “clear history” button: It doesn’t actually delete anything . Then there’s the facial recognition control that was missing on hundreds of millions of accounts. (Facebook later shut down the app’s facial recognition features.) It can even be hard to find the Facebook settings that do work as you’d expect. Facebook has 22 pages of settings, and many privacy controls aren’t on the page labeled “Privacy.”

It’s important for users who care about their privacy to understand the available settings—even if these controls don’t offer all the protections you might want. This guide will lead you to the most useful Facebook privacy settings, plus a few outside tools to further limit the company’s tracking.

Below, you’ll find instructions on how to:

• “Clear” the Data Facebook Gets From Tracking You Around the Web

Keep Your Location Data Private

• Limit Data Collection by Facebook’s Partners

Guard Your Account From Hackers

Make your profile harder to find, limit who sees your photos and posts, take some control over targeted ads, avoid ads on sensitive subjects, prevent facebook from following you on other websites, decide who can message you.

• Protect Your Privacy on Facebook’s Sibling Products

Clean Up Your Friends List

'clear' the data facebook gets from tracking you around the web.

Facebook collects a lot of data about you even when you’re not on Facebook. Hundreds of thousands of apps, websites, and other services send the company reams of information about what you’re doing on other parts of the internet—and sometimes even what you’re up to in the real world.

For a peek behind the curtain, the Off-Facebook Activity menu will give you a look at some of that data.

It houses the Clear History button, which, despite the name, doesn’t actually delete anything. Instead, it “disconnects” the data from your account, preventing the company from using it for targeted ads.

Facebook keeps a copy of that information—and will continue to use it for analytics reports provided to other websites and detailed performance measurements for the company’s advertising clients.

You’ll also find a setting called Manage Future Activity, which lets you keep your history cleared by default. Note that after you turn it off, other companies will keep sending Facebook information about you. But again, Facebook says that the data won’t be used to target you with ads.

There’s a major caveat. Turning off Future Activity disables the Facebook Login tool that lets you sign in to other apps and websites using your Facebook credentials. You can go through a list one by one and disable Future Off-Facebook Activity for specific services where you don’t need Facebook Login.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Your Facebook information > Off-Facebook activity.

From there, you can click “Clear previous activity.” To prevent the data from being used for targeted ads going forward, tap “Disconnect future activity.”

When you use the Facebook mobile app, whether you’re scrolling through your news feed, tagging a family photo on the Golden Gate Bridge, or just leaving the app idling in the background, the company can collect data about your location to use for targeting ads.

The most accurate source of location data can be controlled through your device’s location services settings. Adjusting that won’t stop the company from accessing your location entirely, though. Facebook admits it uses information such as your network connection to approximate your whereabouts for advertising purposes. But if you revoke the Facebook app’s location permission, the data available to the company will be less precise.

On an Android phone: Go to the phone’s Settings > Location > App location permissions > Facebook > Select “Allow only while using the app” or “Deny.” (These instructions may vary slightly depending on what phone you have. On older phones, check for a Permissions menu.)

On an iPhone: Go to the phone’s Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Facebook. Then click either “While Using the App” or “Never.”

Only the newest version of Android provides the “Only while using the app” option. Users with older Android phones can access a location setting in the Facebook app itself to get the same effect. Find a Background Location setting in the Location menu under Privacy Shortcuts.

Limit Data Collection by Facebook's Partners

The Facebook Login feature is an easy way to sign in to other websites and apps. But as described above, Facebook gets to collect more of your personal data in exchange. It can also give the companies that provide those outside services access to account info, which can include your name, photo, email address, and other data visible to the public by default, such as your “likes” and comments.

It may be impossible to find and delete personal info harvested by other companies in the past, but you can see which apps are currently collecting data from your account and stop them. You will no longer be able to access these apps using your Facebook Login, so by default Facebook will notify the app so they have opportunity to provide you with another way to log in. (You can disable that using a check box when you remove the app.)

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Apps and Websites > See More > Click on the box next to the app’s name > Remove.

It’s a good idea to use two-factor authentication , also called multifactor authentication, to bolster the password on any account that offers it. This is particularly important if you’ve ever used the same password on more than one account or you tend to use subpar passwords. (Consumer Reports has expert tips for creating good passwords.)

Once you turn on two-factor authentication in Facebook’s settings, the company will send you a verification code—via text or app—to confirm your identity when you access your account from an unverified location, device, or browser.

That makes it much harder for someone to breach your account with a stolen password.

But Facebook has misused this technology. After an investigation a few years ago, the company admitted it used phone numbers collected for two-factor authentication for advertising purposes .

Security experts still recommend that you use two-factor authentication, however, because it’s one of the best ways to protect your account. You don’t have to give Facebook your phone number to use two-factor authentication, either—a dedicated app such as Google Authenticator or Duo Mobile can be a more private and secure solution. It’s easy to set up.

If Facebook already has your phone number, follow the instructions in the section below so that strangers can’t use it to find your page.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Security and Login > Set Up Two-Factor Authentication > Get Started.

The default settings on Facebook permit your user profile to show up in any Google search that includes your name. But you can change the settings to make your profile less Google-able. And while you’re at it, you can also set limits on who can send you friend requests and look you up using the email address or phone number tied to your account.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Privacy > Do you want search engines outside of Facebook to link to your profile? > Edit > Click the check box on the bottom > Turn Off.

Then on the same page, select “Who can look you up using the phone number you provided?” > Only me. Do the same for “Who can look you up using the email address you provided?”

It can be fun to share the details of your life with family members and friends, but it’s less amusing to serve up that data to criminals who comb Facebook pages for personal details to use in identity-theft scams . If you leave your info open to the public, anyone can discover your birth date, mother’s maiden name, and passion for poodles.

Each time you post a new photo, video, or status update, Facebook’s interface gives you the option to keep the news among your friends. You can even exclude certain pals—like, say, your boss or a nosy neighbor.

That’s a good practice going forward, and it’s also easy to go back to your old posts and limit the audience retroactively. That way, you can make certain you’re not sharing telltale details with people you don’t know. While you’re at it, you can change the default audience so that your future posts are more private automatically.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Privacy > Who can see your future posts? > Edit. Select “Friends” or another group you may have set up.

Then on the same page, click “Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or Public?” Select “Limit Past Posts.”

There isn’t much you can do to keep your information away from Facebook’s marketing services. But there is a lot you can do to take some control over the kinds of ads you see (in fact, we’ve written a whole guide to controlling annoying or upsetting ads).

There are three Facebook settings worth thinking about. The first is “Data about your activity from partners.” The specifics are complicated, but the bottom line is that if you turn the setting off, Facebook says it will avoid using some of the data it gets about what you do on other companies’ websites and services for its own ads.

The second is “Ads shown off of Facebook.” Facebook doesn’t just show you ads on Facebook; the company’s ad system runs all over the internet and even in other apps. The “Ads shown off of Facebook” setting determines whether advertisers can use information based on your Facebook activity to target you on other platforms.

Finally, you’ve probably seen Facebook ads that list your friends’ names: “So-and-so likes . . . .” That’s because Facebook lets advertisers use your name and products you “like”—Girl Scout Cookies, Starbucks coffee, Ford trucks—in ads pitched to people in your network. You can turn off the “Social Interactions” setting to put a stop to it.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Ads > On the left-hand side, select “Ad Settings” > Select “Data about your activity from partners” and turn the toggles off. Then do the same for “Ads shown off of Facebook” and “Social Interactions.”

(Facebook has recently been rolling out updates to its advertising settings. The last few instructions may be slightly different on some accounts, but they will be close enough that you should be able to find your way.)

You can’t turn off Facebook ads, but you can try to avoid ads on certain topics. If there’s a subject or a brand you want to avoid, you can type it into a search bar and you may be able to limit whether those ads are delivered to you. Facebook also recommends a few subjects that are commonly sensitive for some people, including alcohol, gambling, parenting, pets, politics, and weight loss. However, the company doesn’t guarantee you’ll never see ads on any of these topics, even if you turn them off.

There are also additional ways you can adjust your social media feed for a healthier and more pleasant experience.

On a computer: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Ads > Ad Topics > Click the search bar to see some recommended selections, or search for the topic you want to avoid. Click on the topic, and select “See fewer.”

As we discussed above, Facebook’s data collection doesn’t stop when you leave the platform . If you’ve ever gone to a website that uses Facebook services—Like and Share buttons, Facebook Login, or the company’s invisible analytics tools—you’ve provided info on the stories you’ve read, the videos you’ve watched, and the products you’ve looked at.

“If those buttons are on the page, regardless of whether you touch them, Facebook is collecting data,” says Casey Oppenheim, a co-founder of the digital security firm Disconnect.

Millions of websites also use Facebook’s hidden tracking “pixels” that give you no visual clue you’re being monitored. There’s no foolproof way to stop that surveillance—and no way at all through Facebook’s settings. You can, however, install an ad blocking extension such as Disconnect, uBlock, or Privacy Badger on your browser to disrupt Facebook’s efforts to track you online.

The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser, has designed an ad blocker specifically for this task. It’s called Facebook Container , and it uses a unique browser tab to wall off the social media platform from the rest of your online activity. It takes only a few clicks to install the Facebook Container extension for Firefox.

(Consumer Reports uses Facebook’s services, too. For details on the data we collect, consult our privacy policy .)

When someone you aren’t friends with tries to contact you, their messages generally get sent to a “message requests” folder.

You won’t get a notification about these messages, and Facebook lets you read them without telling the other person you’ve taken a look. That gives you a little preview before you decide to open up a dialog.

However, you can decide not to receive these messages at all. Or you can go in the other direction with some kinds of connections and have messages open up straight to a regular chat. Because the company combined the messaging platforms on Instagram and Facebook Messenger, there are also some options for communicating with Instagram followers you haven’t friended on Facebook.

Facebook allows for some fine-tuning. You can make specific choices for different categories of people, such as friends of friends.

On a browser: Click your profile picture in the top right of the Facebook home page > Settings & privacy > Settings > Privacy > Under “How you get message requests,” tap the various potential connections to choose how you want to be contacted.

Protect Your Privacy on Facebook's Sibling Products

Adjusting your Facebook settings is a great first step toward protecting your privacy. But the apps on your phone and the services you use online unite to form an entire data ecosystem, and you should take the whole picture into account.

If you use Facebook’s—or now Meta’s— Instagram and WhatsApp , lock down your settings on those products, too. (And now that you’re on a roll, consider doing the same for other services, such as Google and even LinkedIn .)

The people on your friends list can jeopardize your privacy, sometimes without even knowing it.

While Facebook closed the loophole that allowed the 2014 data leak that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal , there are plenty of other ways friends can let you down—by posting inappropriate content, for example, or falling for scams that permit accounts to be hacked.

That’s why it’s best not to maintain Facebook “friendships” with people you don’t really know (e.g., your best friend’s sister’s yoga instructor). Facebook doesn’t make it easy to delete large groups of friends. You have to go to your Facebook profile, select people to dismiss one at a time, hover over a drop-down menu, and choose “Unfriend.”

To make the process a little easier, consider using the “birthday method.” When you log in to Facebook, check the birthday notifications the app has sent you, and for each one decide whether to send out well wishes or to quietly unfriend people you’re willing to part with . This can help you keep your account more secure.

How Targeted Ads Work

Do you often see online ads that relate to your likes and hobbies? On the “ Consumer 101 ” TV show, Consumer Reports expert Thomas Germain explains to host Jack Rico what targeted ads are and how they work.

Thomas Germain

Thomas Germain was previously a technology reporter at Consumer Reports, covering several product categories and reporting on digital privacy and security issues. He investigated the sharing of sensitive personal data by health-related websites and the prevalence of dark patterns online, among other topics. During his tenure, Germain’s work was cited in multiple actions by the Federal Trade Commission.

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Facebook privacy settings: Protect your data with these tips

As Facebook turns 16, we look at how to keep your personal information safe from prying eyes

Amer Owaida

04 Feb 2020  •  , 5 min. read

Sixteen years, that’s how long Facebook has been around. This means that it has accompanied some of us throughout our teenage years to adulthood. Quite an achievement since websites and services tend to lose popularity over the years and fade out of existence, lingering in the dim, inner recesses of our memories – remember MySpace?

To be frank, though, Facebook’s reign as the social network of choice hasn’t always been rainbows and unicorns. It has had its fair share of controversies, usually, concerning privacy and how it uses the data it gets from its users. That, in turn, raised questions about how to protect users’ data and how it is handled. Regulations such as GDPR can only do so much; users must bear some of the responsibility for protecting their data themselves.

What better time than Facebook's anniversary to look at how to review your account settings and protect your privacy from prying eyes? One way to do it is use Facebook’s built-in tool, the Privacy Checkup , which will guide you through the basic steps to get your profile under control.

Lock down your profile

It's great to have an idea of what information others can see about you when they click on your profile. That includes both your personal information and the posts that you share with the world. The good thing is that you can toggle the individual options according to your needs. Strictly speaking, not all of your information needs to be shared with everyone, such as your birthday, education or relationship status.

Some things should be kept close to home. If you want to go the extra mile, you can also secure your friend list . To be sure how your profile looks to the outside world, you can check how a public audience sees it. Go to your profile and then choose the View As option; this will allow you to see it through the lens of the public and you can adjust it accordingly.

Audit your posts

Once you’ve increased the privacy of your personal information and profile, auditing your posts should be your next order of business. You never know who will see that embarrassing moment from ten years ago that you shared and never looked back. You can either scroll through years of posts manually or, in the settings, you can limit who can see your past posts and even your future posts as well.

Fair warning, though: if you choose to limit your past posts, then the only way to undo it is to change who is allowed to see the posts one-by-one. As for future posts, those can be limited as well, from choosing one of the preselected groups or going a step further and creating a custom list.

RELATED READING: Facebook now lets you delete old posts in bulk

Also, curating what you share can help immensely. After all, do you really need to share every tiny detail of your life? Oversharing can help create a fairly comprehensive picture of your habits, which can then be used against you.

Who are your friends, anyway?

Have you ever looked at your friend list on Facebook and stopped to think ask if it were preposterously long? You probably aren’t alone. We’re not saying you should now go on an impromptu deleting spree, but you should probably browse through the list to see how many of these people you actually know.

Related reading: Send in the clones: Facebook cloning revisited

Although it may sound like a tedious chore, there are many upsides to it. You may delete people you have never spoken to or added at a social gathering and haven’t connected with since, and you may even try to reconnect with old friends. The greatest benefit is that you'll have tidied up your list and maybe even slimmed it down a bit and will have an idea of who has access to the things you share on your profile.

Facebook photos

Similar to posts, you can edit the privacy settings of your photos, which means deciding who can see the photos and albums that you’ve posted. Unfortunately, if you didn’t add the photo, then you cannot remove it; the same goes for an album: removing and editing privacy settings can only be done by the uploader.

On the other hand, you have the option of untagging yourself from photos, which doesn’t remove the photo, but it removes the association with your profile. You can also turn off the face recognition feature so that Facebook doesn’t automatically recognize you in photos and videos and doesn’t suggest your profile for tagging.

Timeline and tagging

These settings allow you to decide who can see your timeline, post on it or if they can further share the things that you’ve already posted. In short, here you can decide who and how they can interact with your Facebook timeline. This includes posts in which you have been tagged, which again you can set to private or choose your audience.

One of the features that you should turn on is the Review feature. This allows you to review anything where you’ve been tagged before it makes its way to your timeline, thus allowing you to curate what your friends see about you.

Apps and websites

Facebook is one of the premier options to log into different websites and services. Alternatively, we sometimes use it to participate in competitions, quizzes or games. These sometimes request an exhaustive list of permissions that do not even have to relate to their functions. Whatever the case may be, it isn’t always safe to grant all these permissions to third-party apps, of whose provenance we are uncertain.

Luckily, there is an Apps and Websites section that lists all the apps and websites where you used your Facebook account to log in. There are three sections: Active, Expired and Removed. You can then look into those and manually log out of them and limit the information that you share with them moving forward. That applies to the Expired section as well. Nobody expects you to keep track of every service you have ever used; this tool lifts that burden off your shoulders. Nevertheless, you should check it every now and then to see what permissions you granted to whom; even better, clear the list.

Download your information

If you ever wondered about the sum of all the information that Facebook has accumulated about you over the years that you have been a using it, wonder no more. You can download a complete copy of the information or only certain types from certain date ranges; the choice is yours. Alternatively, if you don’t feel like downloading gigabytes of data, you can choose the Access Your Information tool. You can use  Facebook’s Help Center  for a step-by-step tutorial.

After a 16-year reign, it looks like Facebook is here to stay. Auditing your settings from time to time is a prudent choice if you want to keep being an active user. As the saying goes: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure", and you should probably apply this to your online privacy settings as well.

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Facebook is asking people to review their privacy settings — here's how to navigate the notifications

Facebook has started asking users to go through their settings and make sure they're happy with the amount of data they are handing over.

That's thanks to a new European law called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which comes into effect on May 25.

That law makes it much harder for companies like Facebook and Google to collect and make money from your data — especially without your explicit consent.

It also means Facebook can't access sensitive information like your sexual preferences, religious beliefs, and political beliefs without your proactive consent.

Now Facebook has to make sure you look at your settings before May 25 — or risk being fined 4% of its annual turnover, which represents billions of dollars.

Here's how to navigate those new settings and keep your data private.

1. If you use Facebook in Europe, you will probably see this notification pop up. It's hard to miss.

2. The notification looks dry as dust — but there's one big update Facebook is trying to push on European users: Facial recognition.

Facebook's ability to recognise people's faces in photos to make tagging easier hasn't been available in Europe since 2012. Now it's introducing facial recognition by stealth , according to critics.

But more on that later.

3. First, Facebook will ask you about 'specially protected data.' This refers to your political views, your sexual orientation, and your religion — which you might have shared with Facebook when you first created your profile.

4. Facebook doesn't tell you this explicitly, but it can target ads at you based on your religion.

5. Hit 'Manage Data Settings' if you aren't happy with Facebook knowing your religion, political views, or sexual preferences.

6. Facebook will try REALLY hard to stop you deleting that information.

7. But if you hit 'Continue,' you will eventually be able to delete this information from your profile.

8. Now you've deleted all that sensitive information from your profile, you should stop seeing ads relating to your religion or views, right? Nope. Facebook can infer a lot about you just from the posts and pages you like.

You can't really stop Facebook guessing a bunch of stuff about you based on the groups, pages, and posts that you hit 'Like' on. But you can stop advertisers from targeting you based on that data — read my colleague Julie Bort's full guide here .

9. Once you've decided what to do with your sensitive information, Facebook will ask you to switch on facial recognition. This means Facebook can recognise you in a photo even when no one has tagged you.

10. Facebook will try and encourage you to passively click 'Accept and Continue' to switch on facial recognition. If you don't want that on by default, hit 'Manage Data Settings.'

11. Facebook will keep trying to convince you that facial recognition is really useful. Hit 'Continue' if you're determined to switch it off.

12. Now Facebook will finally let you switch off facial recognition in photos and videos. You can switch it back on if you change your mind.

13. Finally, Facebook will ask you to accept its updated terms of service. You don't have a lot of choice here — you can either accept or delete your profile.

14. And that's it! Even with these new privacy changes, Facebook still knows a lot about you.

Here are some more guides to help you lock down your profile even more:

Read my colleague Jim Edwards' guide to see which apps might still be tracking you, and how to block them.

Read Julie Bort's guide on seeing what Facebook knows about you .

And read Ben Gilbert's guide on how to delete Facebook .

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Louise Matsakis

What to Look for in Your Facebook Data—and How to Find It

You've likely heard by now about Cambridge Analytica , the shadowy, Trump-affiliated data analysis firm that reportedly siphoned off information belonging to 50 million Facebook users, according to The Guardian and Observer , along with The New York Times . In the wake of the scandal over Facebook's privacy practices, users have become newly interested in the data that Facebook collects and retains about them. But while the social network makes it fairly simple to download everything it knows about you, it doesn't provide a roadmap for how to parse that data or figure out what it means.

Facebook announced Wednesday , however, that in the coming weeks, it will expand the data it allows you to download to include likes, reactions, search history, and location history. The social network also plans to add an option for users to transfer the data to another service if they want. Part of the rollout includes a new tool called Access Your Information, which allows users to more easily view and delete old posts, reactions, comments, and search history.

For now though, your Facebook data is still likely filled of surprises. Over the weekend, some Android users were shocked to learn that Facebook retained metadata about their call and SMS history. That's far from the only interesting piece of information you might find by sorting through your Facebook file. Here's what I found looking through mine, and tips for how to find the most interesting information in yours.

First, you'll need to download the file of data that Facebook has on you. To do so, go to your Facebook settings . At the bottom of the General tab, you should see an option to Download a copy of your Facebook data _. After opting in, you'll receive two emails, one acknowledging that Facebook received your request, and another that includes the file when it's ready. Depending on how much content you've posted to Facebook—including photos, videos, text posts, and other forms of media—it might take some time for the file to be prepared.

I've been on Facebook for over a decade, and my 277.2 MB file was ready within a half hour. But I also haven't uploaded many photos or videos to the site. Once you have the file, you can download it as a folder to your desktop. Mine was labeled "facebook-louisematsakis."

The first piece of information you will want to look at is a file labeled index.htm . Clicking on this file will open a tab within your browser, with a menu of options on the left-hand side. Under Profile , you'll find a list of basic information the site has about you, like the exact time you signed up for Facebook, the contact information you've provided, as well as any work or education history.

One surprising piece of information on this screen: Facebook keeps a list of everyone you've previously said you were in a relationship with. For me, this includes a bunch of my friends, because back in middle and high school, it was cool to declare you were in a relationship with a close friend. The list only includes three people I've actually dated. The very first person on the list is, inexplicably, my own cousin (being 13 was weird, OK?).

The Photos tab contains every photo you've ever uploaded to the site, as well as related metadata, like the IP address from which each photo was uploaded. Scroll down, and you'll find a link to the facial recognition data that Facebook retains. If you click it, you can see your Example Count , which could be the number of photos Facebook used to train a machine learning algorithm to recognize your face. My Example Count is 214. Facebook says this figure is "a unique number based on a comparison of the photos you're tagged in. We use this data to help others tag you in photos."

If you want to opt-out of Facebook's facial recognition features, here’s how to do that.

Karen Williams

Vittoria Elliott

Lauren Goode

Reece Rogers

One interesting note about photos: My Facebook data didn’t appear to included tagged photos of me, just photos I had uploaded myself.

The Videos tab contained dozens of clips I posted to my friends' timelines when I was a teenager. It's impressive how much you can forget what you shared over the years; I was horrified to realize that Facebook had so many grainy videos of my face at 13, 14, and 15 years old. Also fun? If you recorded a video on Facebook but never actually posted it, Facebook still has it .

In the Friends tab you'll find every single one of your Facebook friends, as well as the date that you added each other. If you unfriended someone, and then re-added them later, they'll show up on this list twice. The list also includes all of the friend requests that you have declined.

Pay special attention to the very bottom of the page, where you can see what "Friend Peer Group" Facebook thinks you're in. Mine says "Starting Adult Life."

The most interesting part of your index is the Ads tab. There, Facebook will show you a list of ad categories it has associated with your account. Mine include dozens of publications like Harper's and Buzzfeed, as well as vexing ones like "Goth subculture" and "Middle Class."

Below this list you'll find advertisements you've supposedly clicked on; mine has 40, dating back to January. And below that is a distressing list of advertisers Facebook says "have your contact information." (Former Facebook ad executive Antonio García Martínez suggests that this means the advertisers came to Facebook with your information, not the other way around.) They may have brought this information to the social network using Facebook's custom audience tool , according to a Facebook representative. For me, this includes major corporations like Walmart, ASOS, Airbnb, and Marriott Rewards. It also includes a number of bands, the dating app Happn, which I don't recall ever using, and "House of Blues Dallas." I have never been to Dallas.

One data set seems surprisingly incomplete; under Pokes I was inexplicably greeted by only two pokes, one from 2013 and another from last year. I have certainly poked people on Facebook more times than this. It's unclear why Facebook has only chosen to retain these two poking instances, though other users appear to have experienced the same oversight. Facebook didn't answer a request for comment about why it has only kept track of a select list of pokes.

The last thing to check in your index is the Applications tab, which is a list of apps you've used to sign up with using your Facebook profile.

Aside from the index, your Facebook data file should also include several other folders, labeled html , messages , photos , and videos . Mostly they repeat information that’s also included in the index. Don't skip them altogether though. In Messages > files , for instance, are all the files you've sent over Facebook Messenger, and Messages > photos contains all the images you’ve sent. Mine only appear to date back several years, likely because I used to regularly delete my Facebook messages.

If you have an Android device, you may have given Facebook or Facebook Lite permission to access your call and text history years ago. Specifically, before Google changed how permissions worked in Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, simply allowing Facebook to access your contacts also let it grab your call and message logs.

Find out for sure by clicking the Contact Info tab. Because I've only ever used an iPhone—Apple doesn't allow apps to scrape call and text history—this tab only contained a list of my phone's contacts. If you have granted permission, this screen will also include a certified creepy list of your call and SMS history.

Now that you’ve looked through your Facebook data, here’s how to delete some of it. Keep in mind that Facebook says it plans to soon make it easier to delete data, but for now, the process is fairly cumbersome.

The first place to start is your contacts. First, head over to Facebook’s “ Manage Invites and Imported Contacts ” page. At the bottom of the screen, there’s an option to “Remove all contacts,” though you can also choose to manually remove specific ones. You’ll need to repeat this step for contacts you’ve uploaded through Facebook Messenger, which you can do here . Lastly, you’ll need to prevent Facebook from continuously re-uploading your contacts. You can learn how to turn off that settings here . Again, you’ll need to do it twice, once on the Facebook App and again on Messenger.

Lastly, here’s how to delete individual posts you’ve made to Facebook. Click the top right-hand options tab on desktop, and then click Activity Log . There, you’ll be able to delete any post from your history, and you can jump to specific years if you’d like to delete the oldest stuff first. If you’re interested in bulk deleting, you can use a Chrome extension like Social Book Post Manager .

If you’re not quite ready mass-remove your old posts, but want to limit who can see them, here’s a full guide to updating your Facebook’s privacy settings. Remember, though, that Facebook says it's going to re-vamp its privacy features in coming weeks—which means you get to do this all over again.

• The Federal Trade Commission is officially investigating Facebook's privacy practices for the first time since 2011
• What would it even look like if the FTC or another agency tried to regulate the social giant ?
• Here's an inside look at Facebook's last two hellish years, as the company has struggled to maintain public trust

Kate Knibbs

Paresh Dave

Robert Peck

Amanda Hoover

How-To Geek

How to see what data facebook has on you.

How much does Facebook know about you? Here's how you can see it all.

Quick Links

Your facebook information, download your information.

Facebook knows a lot about you. Some of this information was handed over when you signed up, but there's some stuff you might not know about. We'll show you how to see and download it.

First, you might be curious to see just how much data Facebook has on you. There's the obvious stuff like your name, date of birth, relatives, and so on, but what else does it know?

To see, log in to Facebook  on a web browser, like Google Chrome, on a computer. Click the arrow at the top right, and then select "Settings & Privacy."

Next, click "Settings."

In the "Settings" sidebar, click "Your Facebook Information."

You'll see a few different areas to explore. Click "View" to the right of "Access Your Information."

Here, you'll see all your Facebook information organized into several categories. Clicking any of these will reveal links so you can review everything.

Scroll down to the "Information About You" section. This is where you can review the more personal information Facebook collects. Again, click any category to expand it.

After you've explored all of the information, you might want to download a copy of it for safekeeping. This is a good idea if you plan to delete your account.

To do so, go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Your Facebook Information. Click  "View" next to "Download Your Information."

You'll see all the categories we explored above. Check the box next to the categories from which you want to download information.

Next, you can decide how far back you want to go. By default, it will download all the information starting from when you first created your account. Click "All of My Data" to adjust the date range.

Use the calendars to select a start and end date, and then click "OK."

Next, choose the format in which you want to save your downloaded information. HTML is easier to view, but JSON works better for importing to other services. Unfortunately, you can't do this twice and save the info in both formats.

The last option is "Media Quality"; the higher the quality you choose, the larger the download will be.

After you've made all your selections, click "Create File" to start creating the download.

You'll see the "A Copy of Your Information Is Being Created" notification. You might also receive an email confirming this. Facebook will notify you when your information is ready to download.

That's all there is to it! Depending on how much information you selected, it might take a while for the file to be created.

When it's ready, you'll be instructed to download the ZIP file . This file will include folders with all of your information. Some of it will be hard to translate, but things like photos and videos are straightforward. When you look through it, you'll see everything Facebook knows about you.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Zip Files

Facebook is asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings

Starting this week, Facebook will begin asking users worldwide to review their privacy settings with a prompt that appears within the Facebook app. The experience will ask you to review how Facebook uses your personal data across a range of products, from ad targeting to facial recognition. This request to review Facebook’s updated terms and your settings follows a similar experience rolled out to users in the European Union as a result of the new user data privacy regulation, GDPR.

However, EU users have to agree to the new terms of service in order to continue using Facebook,  Recode  point out, after asking Facebook how the worldwide experience differs from the one being shown in Europe.

Elsewhere in the world, users who dismiss the prompt twice will be automatically opted in.

But before you close that window too quickly, you may want to take a look at what Facebook is asking.

Review Your Privacy Settings Posted by Facebook on Wednesday, May 23, 2018

In the new prompt, which appears when you visit News Feed, Facebook will allow you to review details about advertising, facial recognition, and the information you’ve chosen to share on your profile.

For example, you may no longer feel comfortable having your religion, political views or relationship information exposed, and the new experience will allow you to change those settings.

As you continue reviewing your information, each screen will walk you through what data is collected and how it’s used, allowing you to make better decisions about Facebook’s use of your data.

Specially, Facebook says the feature will include the following information:

• How it uses data from partners to show more relevant advertising
• Political, religious, and relationship information you’ve chosen to include on your profile
• How it uses face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy
• Updates to its terms of service and data policy (that were announced in April)

If you’ve already disabled some of these settings, you won’t be shown that information or encouraged to turn the features back on.

After you adjust your settings, the changes go into effect immediately and you can adjust them again at any time from  Settings  or  Privacy Shortcuts,  the company says.

Though the GDPR is aimed at protecting user data in the EU, Facebook has come under fire for its breach of trust with its user base due to the Cambridge Analytica scandal – where data was hijacked from 87 million users without their consent. The company is now revisiting a lot of its user data privacy practices and making changes as result of both that and GDPR’s requirements.

The experience will start popping up on Facebook this week.

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It's Time to Review Your Facebook Privacy Settings

• Online Safety

How often do you check your Facebook privacy and security settings? With the recent revelation that data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica acquired profile information and "likes" on about 50 million Facebook users, it's time to review your settings. The data collection started with a third-party quiz that about 270,000 people took after they logged in with their Facebook username and password. That allowed data to be collected from those people's friends whose settings allowed it.

While some people have decided to delete or suspend their Facebook accounts, others need or want to continue using it but with more caution. Here are some things you can do to secure your data and limit access to it.

Change your login method on sites where you logged in with your Facebook credentials. Numerous sites allow you login using your Facebook username and password instead of creating a separate login. The drawback is that Facebook can collect information about you from those sites and those sites can access your Facebook data. You'll want to change these settings before you change the Facebook settings described below.

Follow These Steps

Change your Facebook settings for sharing information with third-party apps. Follow these steps:

Go to settings

Choose Apps from the sidebar

Choose Apps, Websites and Plug-ins. This is strictly an off or on setting. Turning it off prevents your use of third-party apps and websites with Facebook.

Choose Apps other use. This setting allows you to choose what information is shared with apps, games and websites. Note that Facebook is updating this setting.

Choose an app or website under Logged in with Facebook. This allow you to update your settings or remove it.

This article from How-To Geek provides a step by step guide for making these changes.

Change your Facebook privacy settings to minimize the information you share publicly. For example, choose to share your posts only with your friends, not friends of friends. If the friends of friends setting is chosen, your post may be seen by hundreds if not thousands of relative strangers.

Use a tracker blocker. A tracker blocker browser add-in such as Disconnect, Ublock, or Privacy Badger can block Facebook, advertisers, and other trackers from collecting information about what you do online.

Limit the information you provide or post online not just in Facebook but anywhere. Don't post anything that you don't want to be public.

Review your privacy and security settings regularly. Social networks and other sites that make their money from advertising periodically make changes to the privacy and security settings that they offer. By reviewing these settings frequently you can reduce the amount of your data that is shared.

For More Information

• Facebook Data May Have Been Illicitly Used for Politics, and It Started With a Quiz
• How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings
• Don't Delete Facebook—Just Be Smarter on Facebook
• How to Stop Facebook Giving Your Data to Third Parties

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These Are the AI Settings You Need to Enable on Your Galaxy S24

The Samsung Galaxy S24 has some really cool AI features, but they're not all enabled by default.

Unlock the full potential of your Galaxy S24 by enabling these features.

The  Galaxy S24 series, Samsung's latest flagship devices, comes equipped with exclusive  AI features  for photo editing, real-time translations, automatically generated summaries for webpages and more.

Don't miss :  Welcome to AI Atlas, CNET's Guide to Today's Artificial Intelligence

However, not all of these features are on by default. If you've got your hands on a new Galaxy S24, and you're still unsure about everything your phone can do, here are five AI settings that you need to enable right now.

For more, check out our review of the Galaxy S24 Ultra and  why the Galaxy S24 Ultra could be doing so much more with AI .

Photos From the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus Cameras

Get real-time translations during phone calls

The first setting you'll definitely want to enable is Live Translate, which features near-real-time voice translations between you and whoever you're speaking with on the phone. Before we get into how the translation tool works, let's turn it on first.

In  Settings , go to Advanced features > Advanced intelligence > Phone and toggle on Live translate . Before you start using Live Translate, choose your language, the language of the person you're speaking with and the translation voices. (There are 13 languages, including simplified Chinese and Mexico, Spain and US Spanish, with more on the way, the company said.) You also have the option to mute your voice and the other person's voice so that you hear only the translation voice.

You can choose language and voice presets for individual contacts.

To use Live Translate, make your phone call, hit the Call assist button and then choose Live translate to start real-time translation. A screen showing your conversation, with both original and translated text, will appear in real time as you speak. After you speak, the translation tool will translate what you say into the other participant's language. If you have your voices muted, participants will only hear the translation voices speak.

The translated conversation is available to browse as text on your screen in real time.

Use generative AI to edit your photos

One of the biggest AI tools on the Galaxy S24 is Generative Edit, which allows you to erase, recompose and remaster the photos you take on your phone, using generative AI. For example, if you want to resize an object or remove a person in a photo, Generative Edit can generate a new background to fill in any missing pieces.

Like the rest of the features and settings in this guide, Generative Edit is not on by default, so you'll need to turn it on in your settings. Go to Settings  >  Advanced features  >  Advanced intelligence  > Photo Editor and toggle on Generative edit . 

Move, remove and resize people and objects in your photos and use generative AI to fill the background in.

In the Gallery app, hit Edit and then tap the AI button , with three stars, to use generative AI. You can then straighten the photo out, and generative AI will help generate more background, or you can draw on the image to move, remove or resize any object in the photo, with generative AI once again creating a background to fill the image in.

Automatically create a summary of your voice recording

The Voice Recorder on your Galaxy S24 doesn't just record audio. It's also capable of transcribing the audio into text and then using AI to summarize the text, which is useful if you're recording a lecture at school or a presentation at work. However, before you can summarize your transcriptions, you have to enable the feature in your settings.

Go to Settings >  Advanced features  >  Advanced intelligence  > Voice Recorder > Summaries  and toggle it on. Turning Summaries on will automatically create a summary of your audio recordings using artificial intelligence.

You can choose various languages besides English for your transcripts and summaries.

If you want to check out the transcription tool at work, tap on an audio recording in the Voice Recorder application, create a transcript and then go into the Summary tab. At the top of the summary you'll see keywords you can tap to check out specific sections in the summary, and underneath that is where the summary lives, full of AI-generated headers and bullet points.

There are timestamps so that you can follow along with the audio as you check out your transcript summary.

Get summaries of any site you visit in your web browser

Another AI tool that you need to enable before you can use it allows you to summarize pretty much any webpage you visit in your browser. For this to work, however, you'll need to be in Samsung's default web browser, which is simply called Internet. The AI summary tool doesn't work in Chrome or any other third-party web browser.

In  Settings  >  Advanced features  >  Advanced intelligence  > Samsung Internet > Summarize , toggle the tool on. Now you can get summaries for webpages.

As mentioned in the settings, these summaries are not stored by Samsung.

Go to the Samsung web browser, visit a site you want to summarize and press the AI icon (three stars) that appears in the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen. Hit  Summarize and you'll get an AI-generated summary of the webpage. Below you can see a summary of David Lumb's CNET story on the Samsung Galaxy Ring .

You can copy the summary to your clipboard, translate it to another language or hit the edit icon on the top right of the summary panel to get a more detailed summary.

Process data only on your device when using AI

The final AI setting you should consider enabling is for your own privacy. In  Settings  >  Advanced features  >  Advanced intelligence , you can toggle on Process data only on device so that any data processed via artificial intelligence is done only on your device, instead of online.

Usually, your data is sent to a third party only to generate a response for whatever feature you're using. It's not used for machine learning or advertisements, and your data is immediately deleted from third-party servers as soon as your generation is complete. But if you feel safer with your data staying on your device, you should enable this setting.

Samsung does warn that toggling this feature on will provide worse results and certain AI features may not work.

While you're here, check out  the best phone to buy in 2024 .

Editors' note: CNET used an AI engine to help create several dozen stories, which are labeled accordingly. For more, see our  AI policy .     

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What happened to Facebook Watch? —

Facebook let netflix see user dms, quit streaming to keep netflix happy: lawsuit, facebook watch, netflix were allegedly bigger competitors than they let on..

Scharon Harding - Mar 28, 2024 8:40 pm UTC

Last April, Meta revealed that it would no longer support original shows, like Jada Pinkett Smith's Red Table Talk talk show, on Facebook Watch. Meta's streaming business that was once viewed as competition for the likes of YouTube and Netflix is effectively dead now; Facebook doesn't produce original series, and Facebook Watch is no longer available as a video-streaming app.

The streaming business' demise has seemed related to cost cuts at Meta that have also included layoffs. However, recently unsealed court documents in an antitrust suit against Meta [ PDF ] claim that Meta has squashed its streaming dreams in order to appease one of its biggest ad customers: Netflix.

Facebook allegedly gave Netflix creepy privileges

As spotted via Gizmodo , a letter was filed on April 14 in relation to a class-action antitrust suit that was filed by Meta customers, accusing Meta of anti-competitive practices that harm social media competition and consumers. The letter, made public Saturday, asks a court to have Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and former CEO, respond to a subpoena for documents that plaintiffs claim are relevant to the case. The original complaint filed in December 2020 [ PDF ] doesn’t mention Netflix beyond stating that Facebook “secretly signed Whitelist and Data sharing agreements” with Netflix, along with “dozens” of other third-party app developers. The case is still ongoing.

The letter alleges that Netflix's relationship with Facebook was remarkably strong due to the former's ad spend with the latter and that Hastings directed "negotiations to end competition in streaming video" from Facebook.

One of the first questions that may come to mind is why a company like Facebook would allow Netflix to influence such a major business decision. The litigation claims the companies formed a lucrative business relationship that included Facebook allegedly giving Netflix access to Facebook users' private messages:

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients). ... In August 2013, Facebook provided Netflix with access to its so-called “Titan API,” a private API that allowed a whitelisted partner to access, among other things, Facebook users' “messaging app and non-app friends."

Meta said it rolled out end-to-end encryption "for all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook" in December. And in 2018, Facebook told Vox that it doesn't use private messages for ad targeting. But a few months later, The New York Times, citing "hundreds of pages of Facebook documents," reported that Facebook "gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages." Facebook has denied that it let third-party companies view its users' private messages

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson declined to comment on specific questions, including why Meta ended Facebook Watch. However, the company rep again denied claims that Facebook let Netflix read its users' private messages. The spokesperson said Facebook's agreement with Netflix only "allowed people to message their friends on Facebook about what they were watching on Netflix, directly from the Netflix app" and that Meta's "confident the facts will show this complaint is meritless."

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