Facebook Updates Its Ad Policy: What You Need To Know & Do About It

Like they’ve done many times before, Facebook have recently made changes to the way its advertising settings now work.If you haven’t already seen these, you can view them by clicking here.
So when they added the new privacy settings, they set the default option to opt-in. What this means for you a as a customer is, if you don’t want Facebook to collect and use your information for ads outside of the Facebook platforms you need to change your settings now.
Firstly, Facebook uses every chance it gets to build a picture of who you are and what you like. Even though Facebook may not make a lot of money from you as person directly, indirectly, that information is incredibly valuable to them.
You can see what Facebook thinks you are interest in by looking at your ad preferences by clicking here.

If you’re like most users, Facebook will have hundreds of topics that have been selected for you based on your search history. You can add and remove topics as you see fit manually.
What we’re looking at today though is restricting Facebook getting this information in the first place.
You may start to wonder how Facebook knows all of this about you? Well when you start to think of all of those “Like” and “Facebook login” buttons we come across on a daily basis then you start to see the picture of how your advertising profile can build up over time.
So how do you stop this from happening? By clicking here and visiting your Facebook ad settings you can see how your Facebook ID is currently used in ads and what other people are seeing. It looks like this:

On the screenshot below it shows what your friends would be seeing when an ad for Jasper’s Market has been endorsed. (This ad could be triggered by the face that you like the company in the past).

Whilst it’s completely your decision to let Facebook track you, we’d recommend that you change each of these options to ‘No’.
It’s also worth taking a look to see what company apps are also tracking you on Facebook. You can view them by clicking here.

And last but not least we come to the Apps others use section. You can access the settings by clicking the edit button shown below:

Once you click the edit button you are shown what information is available to your friends and also, to the apps they use. Depended on how many friends you have and how many apps they use, this could be in the hundreds.

As you can see in the screenshot above, this is probably information you would probably prefer not to share with the world of Facebook. Luckily as you’re reading this article you can amend your settings and privacy to suit you.
It can be scary to think of all the personal information we are unknowingly sharing with Facebook and the app community, but with a few tweaks, you can make sure it’s only the info that you want to share.
Always remember to contact us regarding all your social media needs.