If you’re fed up with Meta right now, you’re not alone. Google searches for deleting Facebook and Instagram spiked last week after Meta announced its latest policy changes. These changes, seemingly designed to appease the incoming Trump administration, included loosening Meta’s hate speech policy to allow for the targeting of LGBTQ+ people and immigrants.
If these changes—or Meta’s long history of anti-competitive, censorial, and invasive practices—make you want to cut ties with the company, it’s sadly not as simple as deleting your Facebook account or spending less time on Instagram. Meta tracks your activity across millions of websites and apps, regardless of whether you use its platforms, and it profits from that data through targeted ads. If you want to limit Meta’s ability to collect and profit from your personal data, here’s what you need to know.
Meta’s Business Model Relies on Your Personal Data
You might think of Meta as a social media company, but its primary business is surveillance advertising. Meta’s business model relies on collecting as much information as possible about people in order to sell highly-targeted ads. That’s why Meta is one of the main companies tracking you across the internet—monitoring your activity far beyond its own platforms. When Apple introduced changes to make tracking harder on iPhones, Meta lost billions in revenue, demonstrating just how valuable your personal data is to its business.
How Meta Harvests Your Personal Data
Meta’s tracking tools are embedded in millions of websites and apps, so you can’t escape the company’s surveillance just by avoiding or deleting Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s tracking pixel, found on 30% of the world’s most popular websites, monitors people’s behavior across the web and can expose sensitive information, including financial and mental health data. A 2022 investigation by The Markup found that a third of the top U.S. hospitals had sent sensitive patient information to Meta through its tracking pixel.
Meta’s surveillance isn’t limited to your online activity. The company also encourages businesses to send them data about your offline purchases and interactions. Even deleting your Facebook and Instagram accounts won’t stop Meta from harvesting your personal data. Meta in 2018 admitted to collecting information about non-users, including their contact details and browsing history.
Take These Steps to Limit How Meta Profits From Your Personal Data
Although Meta’s surveillance systems are pervasive, there are ways to limit how Meta collects and uses your personal data.
Update Your Meta Account Settings
Open your Instagram or Facebook app and navigate to the Accounts Center page.
- You’ll find a link to Accounts Center on the Settings pages of both apps. If you have trouble finding Accounts Center, check Meta’s help pages for Facebook and Instagram.
- If you use a web browser instead of Meta’s apps, visit accountscenter.facebook.com or accountscenter.instagram.com.
If your Facebook and Instagram accounts are linked on your Accounts Center page, you only have to update the following settings once. If not, you’ll have to update them separately for Facebook and Instagram. Once you find your way to the Accounts Center, the directions below are the same for both platforms.
Meta makes it harder than it should be to find and update these settings. The following steps are accurate at the time of publication, but Meta often changes their settings and adds additional steps. The exact language below may not match what Meta displays in your region, but you should have a setting controlling each of the following permissions.
Once you’re on the “Accounts Center” page, make the following changes:
1) Stop Meta from targeting ads based on data it collects about you on other apps and websites:
Click the Ad preferences option under Accounts Center, then select the Manage Info tab (this tab may be called Ad settings depending on your location). Click the Activity information from
16 Comments
jimmydoe
for non tech ppl it’s too complicated to turn off ad settings. Just work with those close to you to export data and delete account. And you don’t have to do it all at once. You can delete X for them today and instagram next months. It’s a rehab process for addicts, they need your continuous love and care, or they might go back to those drugs.
ulfw
Mad at Meta yet trust their settings? That's gotta be a small crossover in the Venn diagram.
Daz1
No I'm not mad at Meta, keep up the great work.
TheEnder8
The thing is, its not just Meta. It's anyone with a square inch of pixels that you can slap an ad on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Meta gets a lot of flack, but it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.
ChicagoDave
MalwareBytes browser extension.
Blocks all the shite. Mobile version too.
redleader55
I find it hilarious that the article starts with "are you mad at Meta for trying to appease the guy at the head of federal government" and ends with "we need strong federal privacy laws". It's the same federal government, you either trust it to legislate or you don't.
xnx
Great message. I wish the instructions were even more succinct and direct.
bitcurious
I feel like only a few years ago the EFF was a non-partisan organization but for the last year every article of theirs I read has a distinctly American progressive perspective. Anyone know what’s behind the change?
I’m struck by the complaint about loosening moderation, right next to a complaint about censorship. It’s a very unprincipled take from an org I used to respect.
exmadscientist
What happens if you've never been a Meta user? I have never had any kind of business relationship with Meta (so far as I know), and have never agreed to any contract or terms of service. What can I do, under US law, to minimize what they store about me and my behavior, or at least keep tabs on them?
xenodium
[flagged]
50208
An addict can't use occasionally or use less … there is only 1 way to quit. You have to actually quit.
amatecha
IMO, skip all the "FB settings" shenanigans and instead just block all Meta (and Google while you're at it) properties using a Pi-Hole on your whole network. VPN into your own LAN with Tailscale and use the Pi-Hole for DNS resolution and never see that shit on your phone again, either. If you want to go a step further, you could do this blocking at the router/firewall level, if you have hardware capable of this.
yash302
[flagged]
ipv6ipv4
Mad at Meta? Don’t work there, and don’t let your friends work there. It’s unethical.
tokioyoyo
Eh, I personally gave up and accepted that I lost the war. It’s kinda nice to be a normie who doesn’t care about much about it. Basic ad blocking, and just generally not caring about what happens with my data. Does it sound awful? Absolutely! But it feels weirdly free, compared to my 2020-self.
To be very fair though, I just use WhatsApp because that’s the messenger of choice for basically everyone in the world. And Facebook marketplace/groups.
Jean-Papoulos
There's a facebook share button right next to the article. The jokes write themselves : https://imgur.com/a/TbIjZSV