Pretty much everything you do on Facebook is tracked by someone but there are ways to limit the amount of tracking that individual companies do of your profile, as a new explainer from Business Insider helpfully shows us.
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The process is fairly simple: First click on the Lock icon in the upper right-hand corner of your Facebook page. Within that menu, you’ll see an option for “See more settings” — click on it. On the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll want to click on the Apps menu option that will give you a complete list of all the apps that are tracking you on Facebook.
From here, you can click on the Pen icon next to each app to see what information each individual app is gathering. Some of them are fairly innocuous — the Yelp app, for instance, just wants your public profile and your friends list. Other apps, however, are tracking pretty much everything in your profile, including your relationship status, your work history and all your photos and videos.
From here, you have a choice to completely remove these apps from your Facebook experience by clicking on the X icon next to their names. We particularly recommend doing this for apps that you may have signed up for years ago that you don’t use any longer and that ask for a rather frightening number of permissions.
For a more in-depth guide to blocking companies from tracking you on Facebook, we recommend checking out Business Insider’s full piece by clicking here.
