First of all: No, you cannot completely switch off advertising on Facebook. But you can check and control why you see which ads. And you can set who else besides you should know what things you're into. What sounds great is exactly what annoys data protection experts: This is how Facebook and its parent company Meta get to know you very well. With this information, which you give Meta for free, the company earns a lot of money: around 31.2 billion US dollars worldwide from advertising alone from October to December 2022! Almost 7 billion of them come from Europe. This is shown by the company data on Meta's investor website (Q4 2022 Earnings). Meta is the company that not only owns Facebook, but also Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus and other products.
In July 2022, Facebook and Instagram received the same terms of use and data protection declarations. That's what we dealt with in this article . In your Facebook settings you can have some control over which information about you is used to select ads for you on Facebook and Instagram. To understand this, let's briefly explain the basics.
How a company places advertising on Facebook and Instagram
Let's say a company wants to advertise its new shoes. To do this, it creates a short video. It uploads it to Facebook and then specifies that it should be shown on Facebook, Instagram and other websites. It also specifies that the following people should see the video: Men between the ages of 18 and 23, live in Düsseldorf, Cologne, Münster and Wuppertal, are interested in fashion and are studying.
Because Facebook and Instagram have such information about their members and exchange it with each other, Meta can now select the profiles to which exactly this advertising is displayed. The company pays money to Meta for this. However, the advertising company does not find out which profiles and therefore which people are actually shown the advertising.
How Meta gets the information about you
You can provide some of your own data on Facebook and Instagram: For example, your age, your place of residence, your gender. To stick with our example: You don't have to tell Facebook or Insta that you're interested in fashion. The algorithm recognizes this when you visit fashion pages or groups on the topic of fashion, interact with posts on the topic (like, share, comment, etc.) and when you use your computer or smartphone, for example, to visit online shops that sell fashion. Everything you do on Facebook, Instagram and other things on your smartphone/tablet/PC can be assigned to your profiles and used to select advertisements. This applies if you do not change the settings of your profiles! And that is exactly what data protection experts all over the world are criticizing - and why there are still numerous legal proceedings against Facebook and Meta.
Restrict data analysis for advertising
Now comes the tiring and time-consuming part: If you don't want Facebook and Instagram to use your interests to select ads, you have to make a lot of settings. For example, you could start by blocking access to the App ID or Ad ID on your smartphone. Instructions for this: here .
Then you have to “work” quite a bit in your Facebook profile and your Instagram account . But we have to be honest and say: it can't be done all at once. Because new interests are constantly assigned to your profiles as you move through Facebook, Instagram and the Internet and you actually have to go into the settings every now and then and make decisions.
Advertising settings on Instagram
With Instagram you can't make the settings on your PC (at least as far as we were able to determine in July 2022), but only in the app on your smartphone. You don't have as many options here as you do on Facebook.
The click paths are the same for the apps on Android and iOS. You first have to open your profile (tap on the profile picture at the bottom right), then tap on the three lines at the top right. Then click Settings. Then you tap on Ads. The page is divided into two sections: “Advertising Preferences” and “General Information”. You can't set anything in the information, you can only see which interests have been assigned to your Insta account and which advertisements you have done something with (e.g. liked, commented or tapped a link).
You have two options for “Advertising Preferences”:
- Advertising Topics . If you tap on it, you will see a list of the various topics that Instagram thinks interest you. You can tap each individual topic and decide whether you want to see fewer ads or delete the topic completely. We explain this in more detail below under “Advertising Topics” in the Facebook settings. Here on Instagram there is a note in English that changes to this should also have an impact on your profile on Facebook.
- Data from partners . Here you can only specify whether such data can be compared with data from your Instagram profile in order to show you relevant advertising. Of course we recommend: no. Unless you want to see targeted advertising from specific companies and on specific topics on Instagram. You won't get a list of the companies that have passed on your data to Instagram. They're on Facebook.
Advertising settings on Facebook
You can go directly to the relevant page either via this link (you then have to log in to Facebook) or by clicking on your profile picture in the top right of your Facebook profile on the website (in the smartphone app on the three horizontal lines at the top or bottom on the right), then go to “Settings” (or “Account Settings”) and there in the left navigation to “Ads” (in the app: “Advertising Preferences”).
On the left side of the PC screen, at the top of the app, you will see a bar with various entries: advertisers, advertising topics and advertising settings. We'll all go through it step by step now.
Advertisers
Link there . Here you will see a list of companies whose advertisements you have clicked on or hidden. Here you can decide individually for each company whether you want to see their ads on Facebook and Instagram in the future or not.
Advertising topics
Link there . Here you can see everything that Facebook has identified as your interests – “based on your activities in meta-technologies products,” it once said as an explanation. Everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, Oculus and numerous other Meta Group services goes here. A like for a post about the iPhone: You are interested in the iPhone. An angry comment about garbage problems: You are interested in environmental protection and waste disposal. A look at an Instagram profile with beach photos from Kiel? Are you interested in the beach, sea, Baltic Sea, Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein...
There are two lists: “Activity-based topics” and “See less”. The first list contains all the interests that Facebook has assigned to you based on your activities. Each topic listed can be used to select advertisements. That's why the term for it is called interest-based advertising . You can click on each individual interest and decide that you would like to see less advertising for it. However, you cannot delete a topic .
“See less”, as the name suggests, lists the topics for which you have already decided that you would like to see less advertising.
Unfortunately, you can't simply delete topics. This means that you may have to live with topics that have nothing to do with you, just because they happened to be assigned to a post that you were looking at. And you cannot prevent Facebook and Instagram from assigning such interests to your profiles. Unless you don't use the networks at all (anymore).
Advertising settings
Link there . This settings area has five sub-areas:
- Data from partners about your activities deals with the question of whether you want to have advertising displayed on Facebook and Instagram from websites or other apps that you have visited and used outside of Facebook/Instagram. Online shops for example. If you click/tap the menu item, you can set sliders for the two networks to Not Allowed . Then Meta should not use your internet surfing behavior to show you relevant advertising on Facebook and/or Instagram.
- When using categories to reach you, you can set which of your personal information (if you have entered it in your profile) may be used to select advertisements: you can switch off employer, job title, education and relationship status (i.e. access, so to speak). forbid). And then there are “Other Categories” that you can see, which you should open to see which of your preferences Facebook uses for advertising selection. Example: You are a member of a Facebook group for guitars, then you have an interest in guitars. So Facebook can (if you don't prohibit it) show you ads from companies that want to reach people who are interested in guitars.
- At Target group-based advertising Companies are listed that have your data (for example your email address), have uploaded it to Facebook and are therefore hoping that you will see their advertising. Unfortunately, you have to click/tap each individual entry to see how your data got to Facebook (for example, “He uploaded or used a list to reach you”; more on this below in the “Custom Audience” section "). You can then click/tap on the entry and you have two further areas:
- If you use a list to display advertising, you can click/tap on “Don’t allow” to ensure that no advertising is shown to you via the entry in such an uploaded list.
- If you exclude yourself from advertising using a list, you can click/tap on “Don’t allow” to set that no advertiser is allowed to exclude you from the list based on information about you. This means that anyone who places advertising could set it so that it is only shown to people who are not yet customers. For example, if your email address is included in such a list and you allow it to be used to select the advertising target group, you would not see such an advertisement. However, if you set “Do not allow” here, you may still see such an ad.
- And then there is advertising outside of meta . Here too, we recommend activating “Don’t allow”. This allows you to regulate whether you are allowed to see advertising on websites outside of Facebook and Instagram that is displayed to you based on the data you have collected on Facebook and Instagram. This is another business area of the Meta company: It offers website operators the ability to automatically fill advertising spaces with ads. You may have seen this before when you are shown an advertisement on a news website about the same product that you recently saw on Insta or Facebook.
- The last item in the ad settings is called Social Interactions . There you can decide who other than you can see what you like on Facebook. For example, an ad for a Facebook page says that you like it if it is shown to one of your friends. We recommend the “Only me” setting. Then the message that you like the page will not appear to others when they see an advertisement for the page.
The Custom Audience
We already mentioned them above. Translated, the term means: custom target group. Facebook offers various options for creating such groups - explaining them all would actually go too far here. Let's limit ourselves to one example: the ability for companies to upload their customers' data, such as email addresses and cell phone numbers, to Facebook. Facebook then compares the entries with all member data. So if you use the same email address for Facebook as you do for an online shop, for example, it may appear in an uploaded list of the shop and Facebook will connect it to your profile. However, the online shop that uploaded the list does not find out which addresses it contains are also used on Facebook. So he can't find you as a customer based on this list. But he can specify for his advertising that everyone on his list should see his ads - or especially those not, if he wants to attract new customers, for example.
Whether uploading your data to Facebook without your consent is legally permissible is controversial. Many companies view this opportunity as a “legitimate interest” to get in touch with their customers. And many also have a clause in their general terms and conditions (GTC) that states that they may pass on data to advertising partners. Unfortunately, it is not easy to stop this approach. However, in the Facebook section “Target group-based advertising” (see point 3 above), you can see the companies that have uploaded your data and, for example, in a letter prohibiting them from passing on your data for advertising purposes. Here we have a sample letter (.pdf) for this . If you have any problems with this, the experts at the North Rhine-Westphalia Consumer Center can, for example, help you with data protection advice .
Request information from the advertisements
In addition to the settings already mentioned, you also have various options for getting information and accessing the settings directly from advertisements The ads have a small arrow or three dots that let you know why exactly the ad is being shown to you.
If you click on “Why am I seeing this ad?” in the selection, a window opens with the answer. For example, it can say: “Because company this ad. From this window you can also decide that you no longer want to see advertising from this company in the future. A link will also take you back to your advertising preferences, where you can adjust the settings listed at the top of this article.
In this overview of the Facebook Terms of Use you will find out more about how the Facebook group Meta obtains your data and what it believes it is allowed to do with it.
Source:
Consumer advice center NRW
Already read? Fake news and conspiracy theories on the Internet: Recognize dangers and protect yourself
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication. The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual contributions were created through the use of machine assistance and were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )