Deactivating your Facebook account doesn't stop data collection

So it ends up deactivating your Facebook account to stop the social network from tracking you, doesn't work. Alfred you looked into this, tell us what you found out. Yeah, so I have been deactivating my account everytime I log out of Facebook Facebook instead of just closing the window or anything like that, because I thought that would put a pause on a data collection any time I'm not on Facebook. It turns out that is not true. The only way that Facebook really stops collecting data on you is if you permanently delete it. Now, a lot of people do need Facebook accounts like I do, cuz I have to sign up for these two workshops every week to get on a college campus, so I have to have my Facebook account. So I thought I'd just reactivate it for those two days and come back to it, but yeah. It was a total waste of time. Yep. Facebook was still tracking you. Yeah, did nothing. So Facebook tracked you as if you're still on the social network. And their reasoning behind it is They assume that when you deactivate your account, it means you wanna come back. So they keep all this stuff. They keep tracking you anyway, so if you come back, all the ads and your newsfeed is still relevant to you. So let's say I go through a basketball phase all of a sudden after I deactivated my account. As when I reactivate it, all my ads will be based on basketball now. Even though I didn't do that before I deactivated my account. What are the other interesting aspects? So yes, you can delete your entire Facebook account and that would get rid of a lot of the data that had alreaady had stored on you, but as you mentioned Story. Facebook is so deeply embedded in the internet at this point that it's still tracking people that didn't ever have Facebook accounts. So yeah, even if you don't have Facebook account they track you based on your browser. Your browser has certain things that identify you so it knows what bookmarks you have an things like that, your IP address. These kind of small fingerprints on your browser. And they can serve you ads just based on, in your browser itself. So even if you're not on Facebook, Facebook is serving you ads on other websites. That's pretty aggravating. I think the difference here, with these deactivated accounts, is people have this assumption in their mind, like I did, that, if it's deactivated, they're probably not tracking me, or trying it to my account. Turns out that is not true, nope.