Off-Facebook Activity: See What Apps Tell Facebook
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If you came here looking for Facebook's "Off-Facebook Activity" setting, it isn't hiding — it's gone. Meta announced on June 9, 2026 that it is retiring the privacy control it launched in September 2019, the same month we first covered it on this blog. In its place is a broader setting called Activity from Other Businesses, reachable from your Accounts Center. Here's the part that catches people off guard: turning that setting off does not stop businesses from sending Facebook your purchase and browsing data at all. It only limits what Facebook is allowed to do with it — for ads, for your Feed, and now for Meta AI too.
We wrote about this tool the week it was born. It's worth being straight with you about what it grew into, because the honest answer isn't as tidy as "toggle this switch and you're safe" — and any post that tells you it is would be lying to you.
What Off-Facebook Activity used to do
Back in 2019, Facebook rolled out a tool that let you see — and disconnect — the activity that other websites and apps were quietly reporting back to Facebook. If you bought a pair of running shoes on some unrelated retailer's site, and that retailer used a piece of Facebook code called the Pixel, Facebook found out you bought running shoes. Off-Facebook Activity was the page that showed you which businesses had been doing that, and gave you a switch to disconnect your account from that data going forward.
It never stopped businesses from sending the data. That part is important, and it was true in 2019 just as it's true now. What it did was break the link between that data and your specific profile, so a disconnected user's shopping history showed up to advertisers as an anonymous, unmatchable blip instead of a targetable person.
🙋♂️ Jake's Reality Check
"So did turning that switch off actually stop the ads following me around? Because it never felt like it did anything."
It stopped some of the targeting, but it never touched the collection. Ethan's take is that this is exactly why so many people assumed the switch didn't do anything — you'd still see personalized ads elsewhere, because a hundred other signals feed that engine besides off-platform business data. The switch was real, just narrower than its name suggested.
What changed in 2026
On June 9, 2026, Meta published a Newsroom post titled "Better Personalization and Changes to Controls for Your Activity From Other Businesses." Three things happened in that announcement, and they're worth separating because most casual coverage blends them into one vague story.
🕐 What changed since we first wrote this
- Then (2019): "Off-Facebook Activity" launched as a standalone tool. It later became "Your activity off Meta technologies" inside the Accounts Center, and it only governed ad targeting.
- Now (2026): Meta discontinued that setting entirely and folded it into an expanded control, "Activity from other businesses," which also absorbed a second setting called "Activity information from ad partners." The rollout began in the US and a number of other countries in July 2026, with more countries to follow — Meta gave no specific calendar day.
- What that means for you: the setting you're looking for has a new name and a wider job. It now decides whether off-platform data personalizes your Feed and Meta AI responses too, not just ads.
Meta's own framing is worth reading closely, because it tells you exactly what did and didn't change: "We're not collecting any new data as part of this update." That's a true statement, and it's also doing some quiet work — it's telling you the collection side was never up for debate. What moved is the usage side.
Off-platform activity — Meta's own examples are games you play or purchases you make on other websites — used to feed exactly one thing: the ads you see. As of the July 2026 rollout, that same pool of data now also shapes what shows up in your Feed and how Meta AI responds to you. Ethan calls this "signal-pool consolidation": Meta's ad system, its content ranking, and its AI assistant all increasingly draw from the same bucket of behavioral data, so keeping one control that only touched one bucket stopped making sense on their end.
⚠️ What this actually breaks
If you'd previously disconnected your off-platform activity, that disconnection is going away with the old setting. Once the new control reaches your account, you start from a fresh choice under the new, wider setting — your old opt-out doesn't carry forward automatically.
How to find the new setting today
The path is the same shape on every device, because it all routes through the Accounts Center — Meta's shared settings hub for Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.
On Facebook (app or desktop)
Tap or click your profile picture, then go to Settings & privacy > Settings. Scroll to Accounts Center and open it — this is a separate settings area shared across your Meta apps, not part of the regular Facebook settings menu, which trips people up the first time. Inside Accounts Center, tap Your information and permissions, then look for Activity from other businesses. Depending on when the rollout reaches your account, you might briefly still see it labeled "Your activity off Meta technologies" — both point to the same place during the transition.
On Instagram
Open your profile, tap the three-line menu, and go to Settings. The route from there lands in the same Accounts Center, because Instagram and Facebook share it once your accounts are linked together. Choose Activity from other businesses the same way.
Once you're on the page
You'll see the option to review recent activity — a list of the businesses that have sent Facebook information about you — and a choice for future activity. Select Don't allow Meta to use this activity to show you relevant content and confirm. If your account still shows the older layout, look for Manage future activity > Disconnect future activity instead; it does the same job under the old naming.
A quick note on reading that recent activity list once you're looking at it: a business showing up there with a handful of reported interactions isn't automatically a red flag. Most entries come from ordinary Business Tools — the same Pixel or Conversions API code that thousands of legitimate retailers run to measure whether their own ads worked. What's worth actually stopping to look at is a business you don't recognize at all, or an interaction count far higher than a single visit would explain, since that's a better signal of something like an embedded tracker on a site you didn't expect to be sharing data at all.
| Where you start | Route | Same for both accounts? |
|---|---|---|
| Facebook app or site | Settings & privacy > Settings > Accounts Center > Your information and permissions | Yes, if linked |
| Instagram app or site | Profile > menu > Settings > Accounts Center > Your information and permissions | Yes, if linked |
| Separate, unlinked accounts | Each app has its own Accounts Center | No — set each one individually |
That last row matters more than it looks. If you keep Facebook and Instagram deliberately separate — different emails, never linked — changing the setting on one does nothing to the other. You'll need to repeat the steps on each.
What this setting actually controls (and doesn't)
This is the part that's easy to misread as "I turned it off, so I'm invisible now." You're not. Here's the distinction Meta itself draws, and it's worth sitting with: businesses have always been able to send Facebook your off-platform activity, through a snippet of code called the Meta Pixel, a server-side tool called the Conversions API, and manually uploaded records of things like in-store purchases. None of that changes because you flip a switch in your account.
What the switch decides is whether Meta is allowed to use that data to shape what you see — ads, Feed content, and Meta AI answers. Turn it off, and events from those businesses still arrive at Meta's servers. They just aren't supposed to be tied back to your personal experience.
✅ Why this is the one to use
If your goal is to stop Meta AI and your Feed from reflecting your shopping habits, and to keep yourself out of retargeting audiences built from purchase and browsing events, this is still the right lever to pull. It's the only account-level control that does that job. It just isn't a data-collection kill switch, and no honest guide should tell you it is.
Ethan puts it this way to Jake: "Think of it less like a lock on your front door and more like a note taped to your mailbox telling the mail carrier not to forward anything to you. The letters still get delivered to the building. You've just told them not to hand you the envelope."
One more wrinkle worth knowing: the July 2026 rollout is separate from a set of location-based ad fees Meta introduced the same month in six European markets. They share a company and a calendar month and nothing else — if you've seen "Meta's July 1 changes" discussed as one story, that's two different announcements getting mashed together. The fee change has a confirmed date; this setting change doesn't.
Does this touch AI training too?
Not directly, and this is a separate question people often bundle in with off-platform tracking. Meta AI's responses can now be shaped by the off-platform activity setting above — that's the new Feed/AI personalization piece. But whether your posts, photos, captions, and Meta AI chats get used to train Meta's AI models is governed by a different policy entirely, and the options depend heavily on where you live.
🙋♂️ Jake's Reality Check
"Wait, so my old public posts might already be training material, and there's nothing I can do about it?"
Depends where you live. If you're in the EU or UK, you can submit a formal objection request through the Privacy Center, and it creates a documented record on your account. If you're in the US, there's currently no toggle to opt out of AI training on public content — your only firm control is not posting publicly, or setting your account to private going forward. Ethan's blunt about this one: "If you don't want it used, don't post it publicly. That's the only guarantee anyone can give you."
Private messages are excluded from AI training under Meta's stated policy either way. Public posts, comments, and interactions with Meta AI are the material in question. Once something has been used in a training run, an opt-out submitted afterward can't retroactively pull it back out — it only affects future training cycles, which is a limitation that applies to essentially every AI company's opt-out process, not something unique to Meta.
If you want stronger protection than the account setting gives you
Since the account setting only limits use, the remaining lever is reducing how much data reaches Facebook's Pixel in the first place. None of these get you to zero, and any post promising that isn't being straight with you — but each one narrows the gap.
A browser that blocks trackers by default
Browsers built around tracker-blocking — Firefox with Enhanced Tracking Protection turned up, or a dedicated privacy browser — stop a meaningful share of Pixel calls before they leave your device. This is a per-browser setting, so it only covers browsing done in that browser.
A container or separate profile for Facebook
Keeping Facebook logged in inside its own isolated browser profile, separate from the profile you use for everyday shopping and browsing, stops the login cookie from following you site to site. You're still logged into Facebook when you want to be; you're just not carrying that identity around with you everywhere else.
Skip "Log in with Facebook"
Every site you join using your Facebook login hands Facebook a confirmed record that you use that service. An email-and-password signup, or a password manager instead, avoids creating that link at all.
A VPN
A VPN encrypts your traffic and hides your IP address from the sites you visit, which makes it harder for Facebook and its advertising partners to tie your activity back to a specific network or rough location. It doesn't stop the Pixel from firing when a site loads it — that's a code-execution issue, not a network issue — but it does remove one identifying signal from the picture.
None of the tools above reach into Meta's ad or AI systems the way the account setting does; they reduce how much data reaches the Pixel in your browser in the first place, which is worth doing alongside the account setting, not instead of it. A few, compared honestly: uBlock Origin is free and open-source, and blocks a large share of tracking scripts including Pixel calls before they load — worth it if you do a meaningful amount of browsing on a desktop or laptop outside the Facebook and Instagram apps themselves. Privacy Badger, built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, learns which scripts are tracking you across sites and blocks them automatically with nothing to configure — a low-maintenance companion if you'd rather not tune settings yourself. Facebook Container, a Firefox-only extension, isolates your Facebook login cookie in its own compartment so it can't quietly follow you into other tabs — worth it specifically if you use Firefox and stay logged into Facebook throughout the day.
And here's the honest "when not to bother": if you mostly live inside the Facebook and Instagram apps on your phone, and rarely browse the open web outside them, the account setting above already captures most of your actual exposure. Installing three extensions to close a gap that's mostly theoretical for your usage pattern is more complexity than most people in that position need — a blocker you installed once and forgot about, breaking a checkout page you actually need, is a more common frustration than the tracking it was meant to stop.
✅ Why this is the one to use
If you only do one thing, do the account setting above first — it's free, takes under a minute, and it's the only lever that reaches into Meta's own ranking and AI systems. Treat the browser-level steps as a second layer for the parts the account setting can't touch, not a replacement for it.
The device-level settings that work alongside this
Your phone has its own advertising controls, separate from anything inside Facebook or Instagram, and they're worth setting once and forgetting.
On iPhone, go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Tracking. This is Apple's App Tracking Transparency system — when it's off, apps have to ask your permission individually before they can track you across other apps and websites, and most people find it easier to turn the master switch off here than to answer that prompt app by app. This governs cross-app tracking at the device level; it's a different layer from the Meta account setting covered above, and neither one substitutes for the other.
On Android, go to Settings > Privacy > Ads. You'll find an option to opt out of ads personalization, and on newer versions, an option to delete your advertising ID entirely. Deleting the ID is the stronger of the two — it removes the identifier apps use to link your activity together in the first place, rather than just asking them not to use it.
Neither of these settings touches your Facebook account directly. They reduce how much cross-app data is available to be sent to Facebook, or any other advertiser, before it ever reaches the Accounts Center setting this post is mainly about.
The adjacent setting most people miss: connected apps
Once you've handled Activity from other businesses, there's a second page worth two minutes of your time: the list of third-party apps and websites you've ever logged into using your Facebook or Instagram login. Off-platform activity from the Pixel is one channel of data reaching Meta. A direct Facebook Login connection is a different, often bigger one — it can hand an app your name, profile picture, email address, and friends list, not just a purchase event.
Inside the Accounts Center, under Your information and permissions, look for Apps and websites — on some accounts this still lives under the classic Settings menu rather than Accounts Center, since Meta has been migrating it gradually. You'll see every service you've ever connected this way, most of which you probably forgot existed. Removing one revokes its access going forward; it does not delete whatever that app already pulled from your profile before you removed it.
⚠️ What this actually breaks
Removing an app here can log you out of it, or reset preferences tied to that Facebook login, if the app has no separate password of its own. Check whether you have another way to sign back in before you revoke access to something you still use.
What this means if you run a business
Jake runs ads for his phone shop, and this change matters to him from the other side of the counter. Every customer who had disconnected their off-platform activity under the old setting still generated a Pixel event when they browsed his site — it just arrived at Meta as an anonymous signal that couldn't join his retargeting audience. As the new setting rolls out, some of those previously invisible visitors become matchable again, which can make his retargeting and lookalike audiences look larger and, potentially, more effective. It's not new data on Jake's end — it's the same Pixel, the same events — just a better match rate on Meta's side.
What Jake doesn't get is a lever to control any of that directly; the choice sits entirely with the customer's account setting, not with the business running the ad. If you're evaluating your own shop's ad performance around this rollout, treat any sudden jump in reported conversions with a little suspicion — it may be Meta matching events it couldn't match before, not a real change in how well your ads are working. A password manager and a reputable antivirus tool are worth having on the till computer regardless, since a shop's customer and payment data is exactly the kind of thing worth protecting on its own terms.
The setting also lives on the account, not the device. If Jake's shop has a spare laptop that two staff members share for browsing during slow afternoons, whoever is signed in determines whose Activity from other businesses setting applies at that moment — not the laptop itself. A shared device with one person permanently logged in effectively applies that one person's setting to everyone who uses it, which is worth knowing if you hand a device to a kid, a partner, or an employee without having them sign in as themselves.
One more family case worth a mention: teen accounts on Facebook and Instagram carry additional restrictions on ad personalization that adult accounts don't, set by default rather than something a parent has to configure from scratch. If you're setting this up for a younger family member, check the account's own settings rather than assuming an adult's Activity from other businesses choice, or your household Wi-Fi, extends any protection to them automatically — it doesn't; the setting is tied to the signed-in account, the same as everything else in this section.
Business Pages are a separate case entirely. A Page's advertising audiences are configured through Meta Business Suite or Business Manager, which has its own data and audience controls — a Page admin doesn't get a single switch that overrides what each individual customer has chosen for their own account. Jake can see how many people are in his retargeting pool, but whether any given customer's off-platform activity is usable for that pool is still that customer's individual choice, made on their own account, not something his business account can turn on or off for them.
When it doesn't seem to work
I can't find "Activity from other businesses" at all. Your account may not have the rollout yet. Look for the older name, "Your activity off Meta technologies," in the same Accounts Center location — it does the same job until your account transitions.
I turned it off, but I'm still seeing eerily relevant ads. Off-platform business activity is one input among many. Your on-platform behavior — what you like, comment on, and linger over inside Facebook and Instagram — still feeds ad targeting on its own, and that isn't governed by this setting at all.
The setting looks different on my Instagram than my Facebook. That usually means the two accounts aren't linked into the same Accounts Center. Set each one individually, as covered above.
I don't have a Facebook account, but I'm worried Facebook still has data on me. That's a real possibility. Facebook can build a partial profile from Pixel data reported by sites you visit even without an account of your own, sometimes called a shadow profile. There's no account setting to manage this, since there's no account — browser-level and network-level steps from the section above are the only levers available to you.
Frequently asked questions
Is Off-Facebook Activity really gone?
Yes. Meta announced on June 9, 2026 that it is discontinuing the setting, which had been renamed "Your activity off Meta technologies" since its 2019 launch as Off-Facebook Activity. It's being folded into an expanded setting called Activity from other businesses.
What is "Activity from other businesses"?
It's the setting that replaced both Off-Facebook Activity and a related control called Activity information from ad partners. It decides whether Meta uses off-platform business activity to personalize your ads, Feed, and Meta AI responses.
When does this change reach my account?
Meta began rolling it out in the US and a number of other countries in July 2026, with more countries to follow over time. Meta hasn't given a specific day, so timing varies by account and region.
Does turning off the new setting stop Facebook from collecting my data?
No. Businesses can keep sending your off-platform activity to Meta through the Pixel and Conversions API regardless of your choice. The setting only limits whether Meta uses that data to personalize your experience.
Does this affect Instagram too?
Yes, if your Facebook and Instagram accounts share an Accounts Center. If they're kept separate, you need to set the option on each account individually.
Does off-platform activity feed Meta AI now?
Yes, as of the July 2026 update. Previously this data only powered ad targeting; it now also shapes Feed recommendations and Meta AI responses.
Can I still see which businesses shared data about me?
Yes. The Activity from other businesses page shows recent activity reported by businesses, similar to how the old Off-Facebook Activity page worked.
Does a VPN stop Facebook from tracking me off-platform?
It hides your IP address and location from sites you visit, which removes one identifying signal, but it doesn't stop a site's Facebook Pixel code from running and reporting your visit.
What's the difference between the Facebook Pixel and Off-Facebook Activity?
The Pixel is the code businesses embed on their own sites to report visitor activity to Meta. Off-Facebook Activity, now Activity from other businesses, is the account-side setting that controls how Meta is allowed to use what the Pixel reports.
Will disabling this setting delete my past off-Facebook activity data?
You can clear your recorded activity history from the same page. Disconnecting future activity is a separate choice from clearing past records, and Meta may retain some data in aggregated form even after disconnection.
Can I opt out of Meta using my posts for AI training?
In the EU and UK, you can submit an objection request through the Privacy Center. In the US, there is currently no opt-out for public content used in AI training.
Does Apple's App Tracking Transparency already block this on iPhone?
No. ATT is a device-level iOS framework that governs cross-app tracking on your phone. Meta's Activity from other businesses setting is an account-level control over server-side Pixel and Conversions API data. They operate at different layers and neither replaces the other.
Is there a way to block Facebook tracking without a Facebook account?
Not through an account setting, since there's no account to set. Tracker-blocking browser settings and avoiding sites that embed the Facebook Pixel are the only levers available.
Why would Meta remove a privacy control instead of adding one?
Meta frames it as simplifying overlapping settings while expanding personalization across ads, Feed, and AI from a single data pool. The company states it isn't collecting any new data as part of the change — only how existing data can be used has changed.
What should small business owners know about this change?
Retargeting and lookalike audiences built from Pixel and Conversions API data may grow as previously disconnected visitors become matchable again. This reflects better matching on Meta's side, not new tracking capability, so any jump in reported conversions is worth treating cautiously rather than as pure ad performance improvement.
Is this the same as the location-based ad fees in Europe?
No. Meta introduced separate location-based ad fees in six European markets effective July 1, 2026. That change has a confirmed date; the Activity from other businesses rollout does not.
Revision note. Originally published August 21, 2019, when we covered the launch week of Off-Facebook Activity. Rewritten August 18, 2026: Meta has since retired that setting and folded it into the broader Activity from other businesses control, which now reaches beyond ads into your Feed and Meta AI. The tool changed its name and its job more than once since we first wrote about it, and we've tried to walk you through exactly where it landed — wherever you land on how much of this to opt out of, we hope this at least saves you the twenty minutes of hunting through settings menus that we spent finding it ourselves.