How to prevent Facebook and Instagram from spying on your Internet activity

  • Social networks collect personal data to offer targeted advertising.
  • The Account Center allows you to manage privacy on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Users can turn off access to their activity and data.
  • It is essential to adjust your privacy settings to protect your personal information.

Learn how to prevent Facebook and Instagram from spying on your Internet activity

Social media has revolutionized the way we communicate with others, making it easier and more accessible. But they also have their negative point, and that is that we often feel “spied on” by them. Hence, more and more people are interested in how to prevent Facebook and Instagram from spying on your Internet activity.

How many times has it happened to you to search for information about a certain product and then see it advertised on your social networks? Surely more than one, so it seems clear that social networks obtain information about us even if we are not aware of it. Let's see if we can avoid it.

How do social networks spy on us?

Are they spying on us through social networks?

Those known as Social Media are free to use for users. and yet, the companies behind these channels bill billions of dollars every year. Money that comes to them, mainly, from the advertising that appears on these platforms.

Companies are aware that social networks have millions of users, and they are willing to pay to advertise on them. Because they know that their products or services will be known by their potential audience. But, in order to offer segmented advertising, Social Media have to obtain data from their users, and that is why they are so interested in monitoring our activity.

Social media surveillance can be carried out in different ways

  • Collection of personal data. Obtaining basic information through data confirmed by the users themselves: name, age, gender, location, interests, and even people with whom they have a connection.
  • Track online activity. To compose a person's consumer profile, networks examine their interactions, clicks on links, “likes” given, searches performed, etc.
  • Personalized advertising. The reaction of users to the advertising shown to them also serves as an indication of whether or not a person is interested in a product or service.
  • Sentiment analysis. The most advanced algorithms incorporate Artificial Intelligence capable of analyzing the feelings or moods that people have regarding certain topics.

In principle, the data collection carried out by social networks is carried out to improve the user experience and provide increasingly specialized services. However, There is growing concern about the privacy and security of personal information facilitation that is leading many people to look for alternatives to not feel so watched when using social channels.

How to prevent Facebook and Instagram from spying on your Internet activity

This way you can stay anonymous on Facebook and Instagram.

In reality, we ourselves are to a certain extent “guilty” that social networks have more and more information about us. Because we do not apply basic precautions or manage the privacy options that these channels make available to us. However, in many cases, The users themselves are unaware that we can adjust the privacy parameters because platforms like Facebook or Instagram do not give us much information about it.

Our ally to protect our privacy on both Facebook and Instagram (you already know that both belong to Meta and have identical management in terms of information protection) It is the Account Center.

The Account Center is a space where users can manage their Meta social media experience. Having greater control over the data that Meta collects and analyzes to show you personalized ads. Once the adjustments are made, These apply to all selected accounts on both Facebook and Instagram.

Access Account Center from Facebook or Instagram

  • Access your profile with your identification credentials.
  • Click on “More options”, which is the menu outlined with three horizontal lines.
  • Choose “Settings and privacy” > “Settings” and there you will see the Account Center.

Privacy management in Account Center

How Account Center can let you know how to stop Facebook and Instagram from spying on your online activity

Once people looking for how to stop Facebook and Instagram from spying on their online activity have accessed the Account Center, they need to choose the settings they want to protect their privacy.

Now we have to follow the route "Account settings" > “Your information and your permissions”, and on the next screen we choose “Your activity outside of Meta technologies”. By clicking on this option we are shown our recent activity through the option “Your activity”.

In this section we see which companies and organizations have access to our data, and we have three options:

  • Disconnect specific activity. Which is responsible for eliminating access to a specific activity. For example, a certain application cannot see our activity or data.
  • Unlink previous activity. What we do when choosing this alternative is disconnect the activity history of our Facebook and Instagram accounts.
  • Manage future activity. We decide whether, in the future, companies and organizations will be able to access our information, or whether we will block their access forever.

To make a more in-depth review of the monitored activity, click on "Recent activity", and we are shown a list of the activities that we have carried out in the past, which allows us to revoke the access of companies and entities to each activity individually. In fact, we can organize the information by activity level, according to the moment in which the activity was carried out, and even in alphabetical order, to have better control over it.

Once the settings that the user considers relevant have been made, Just click on “Disconnect” and the new privacy settings are ready. Of course, if you want to make a new change in the future, this can be done without any problem.

For all those who want to know how to stop Facebook and Instagram from spying on your Internet activity, accessing the Account Center and trying the alternatives it offers to protect personal data is absolutely essential. Because it is an accessible and simple tool that can do a lot to improve our privacy when we browse social networks.


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  1. Responsible for the data: Miguel Ángel Gatón
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
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