How to change your settings to make yourself less valuable to Meta
25 comments
·February 25, 2025flanked-evergl
If you don't want Meta to be viable as a company, the best approach is to stop using their services altogether.
parasti
I am in the EU. I opted out of targeted ads a while back when the Facebook app asked me about it and it is now showing me inline ads with a timer. I literally have to wait before I can continue doomscrolling which is just enough time to just put the phone down and go back to work. Thank you, Meta.
aqueueaqueue
I changed a setting a decade ago to make myself less valuable to Facebook and that was close my account.
bestouff
Unfortunately it's not sufficient. Facebook tracks you from bits of js embedded in many (you have no idea) pages you visit nowadays.
dylan604
Only if you're letting it run on your machine. You don't have to allow it. You being the royal you here
aqueueaqueue
Yeah you remind me to change my dns on all devices :) definitely cat and mouse
chii
closing an account is a datapoint.
What i do is completely ignore facebook, and the rest of their properties (including whatsapp now).
ublock origin to block out the social media links/badges, and make sure to never visit facebook site directly.
Hopefully, what this means is that my "account" and whatever they identify as me, looks like an inactive user with zero potential to be advertised to.
dijksterhuis
> johnoliverwantsyourraterotica.com
well ... now I obviously have to find out about the joke behind this. i've missed watching angry puffin/penguin man.
edit --
might be a non-USA / UK localisation thing but for the first two items, "Manage info" is actually called "Ad settings"
also, on the third one, you can also clear any previous activity from your account on top of disconnecting future activity.
Arnavion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxb-Szj8jVU 22:00 onwards, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0kkEi9JI4 25:00 onwards.
tl;dw he found a 1992 recording of an art auction involving a series of paintings of humanoid rats being intimate, and he really wanted the person who bought one of the paintings to sell it to him.
null
youainti
I know, that is quite the URL
unsnap_biceps
I actually sorta wonder if "No, don’t make my ads more relevant by using this information" makes you more valuable, as they'll just display the most valuable ads they can to you.
gs17
I don't think so, if they had an ad that's untargeted and more valuable than any targeted ad, they could show it to you either way.
darth_avocado
Having worked a little bit in ads, impressions like that won’t get you as much money. Ads usually will bid for a spot, the more targeted info you can present to an ad, the higher the bid for the slot. Random ads don’t have that much to offer.
On top of that, a lot of advertisers have tighter budgets and therefore want the ad on a specific segment to max out ROÍ. So the pool of ads that get shown to you go down. Which means you’ll be shown the same ad repeatedly. And FB does not make as much money off repeat impressions.
And on top of that engagement brings more revenue to the company as compared to just impressions. The whole reason meta exists as a much more profitable business over something like TV or radio for ads is that targeting brings better engagement metrics. And the difference is huge.
Now I am not sure how meta’s ad internals work, but the only way I see them recouping some value out of your selection is by showing you more ads. Maybe you go from seeing ads after every 3 user generated content items to every other item being an ad.
TLDR; turning off preferences doesn’t make you more valuable, but the company could squeeze out as much value from you as other users.
colecut
the value of the ad itself is relative to the targeting of the audience.
__coder__
One step solution, delete your account.
dylan604
if only that was a solution that was effective. while theZuck may not be able to monetize your eyeballs directly, he can still make his yacht payments off of the data you generate for him free of charge from every other website using his SDKs
Nursie
You can also remove yourself from ad topics, and even if you don't want to remove yourself from them it can be interesting to take a look and see what meta has associated you with - https://accountscenter.facebook.com/ads/ad_topics
It won't stop you getting ads, of course, and I have yet to find the holy grail of fictional facebook settings "Never show me reels or suggest groups you think I might be interested in, stick to my actual friends".
kirsebaer
On Facebook, if you go to 'Menu' > 'Feeds' > 'Friends' you will see a feed of only your contacts' activity and none of the suggested posts & random pages on the normal Feed
tbrownaw
1. Install ublock origin
2. Spend less time on their website. Go touch grass or something
3. Mobile apps are right out
lern_too_spel
If you must use mobile apps, patch them with ReVanced Manager.
SOLAR_FIELDS
Being in the Apple ecosystem for over a decade now as a former android person, is custom patches to proprietary app binaries to strip out ad calls actually a thing? Kind of blew my mind that people will jump through hoops like this but maybe it’s actually not that hard to do because the tooling is quite good?
lucumo
It's definitely a few hoops, but not more than a few. The hardest part is that you have to download the right APK file from apkmirror[1] or the likes. It'll open the the right search for you though, but you still need to know a little bit about apk formats.
You also can't just auto-update the app anymore. You have to manually update and patch again.
Other than those two points, it's just pressing a few buttons.
I only do it for YouTube, because the ad load on that app is insane. For others it's not really worth the trouble, I find. Does iOS have a better way for YT?
[1] Ironically, apkmirror has an adblock-blocker, so if you use a DNS based adblock, you have to disable it.
Daz1
Why would I want to do this?
I use Firefox containers for meta controlled domains. I don't trust third party websites to not pass information to Meta or meta to not be greedy. So, a complete absence of meta related cookies and other cruft is the best defense against that. I mostly stopped checking Facebook. I have a few things with social logins tied to Facebook that I open in the same container that I can't be bothered to untangle.
I've de-activated my instagram account ages ago. I just have no interest in what happens there. People sharing images and short videos just annoys me mostly. So, I'm happy to let people entertain each other over there without distracting me. In the same way, I have zero interest in tik tok, youtube shorts, and related nonsense from competitors. My life is rich enough without that.
Whatsapp unfortunately remains a necessary evil because that's what most people I know seem to insist on using. I mostly use it in a browser tab because I hate typing on mobile phones. My thumbs keep hitting the wrong tiny keys. If I type 3 letters, 2 will be wrong. I probably should move whatsapp to its own container. Thankfully it remains ad-free so far (or my adblocker is just that good, hard to tell these days). I think meta mostly walked back controversial plans to do something about that.