Meta knows too

Step 1 — See the off-platform half

1. Go to Settings & privacy → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions.
2. Open Your activity off Meta technologies (formerly Off-Facebook Activity). This lists the businesses that reported your behaviour to Meta. Most people find dozens to hundreds.
3. Clear the history, then disconnect future off-site activity. This is the highest-value switch Meta offers.
4. Use Download your information for the full archive — ads interests, all messages, every login IP.

Step 2 — Cut what's collected

• Ad preferences: remove your inferred interests and turn off ads based on data from partners and on your activity elsewhere.
• Location: revoke background location from the apps, and turn off Location History if it's on.
• Face recognition and photo tag suggestions: off.
• Contact upload: turn off continuous contact syncing and delete already-uploaded contacts. This is how Meta builds shadow profiles of people who never signed up, including your friends.
• Third-party apps connected via Facebook login: revoke everything you don't use this month.
• Activity status and read receipts — small, but they leak your routine.

Step 3 — Lock the profile down

1. Run Privacy Checkup, then set past posts to Friends only in one action.
2. Turn off search engine indexing of your profile.
3. Remove your phone number and email from lookup, or restrict who can find you by them.
4. Hide your friends list — it's a map of your family and workplace, and it's how people get to you sideways.
5. Strip employer, school, hometown, and current city if you've been harassed or want to avoid being.

WhatsApp, specifically

Message contents are end-to-end encrypted by default and that's genuine. The gap is metadata: who you talk to, when, how often, your phone number, and your device details are all visible to Meta. That pattern is frequently more revealing than the words.

• Turn off cloud backups, or use an encryption key — an unencrypted backup in iCloud or Google Drive undoes the encryption entirely.
• Set disappearing messages as the default for new chats.
• Restrict profile photo, last seen, and status to contacts.
• For anything sensitive, use Signal instead — same encryption, far less metadata, no advertising business attached.

Blocking the pixel

Settings only limit what Meta admits to using. To stop the reporting at source: uBlock Origin blocks the pixel outright, Firefox and Brave isolate the cookies, and stripping ?fbclid= from links prevents the click being attributed to you. See trackers & fingerprinting.

If you want the platforms but not the surveillance, the realistic setup is: apps deleted from your phone, accounts used in a browser with a tracker blocker, and off-platform activity disconnected.