How to Change Facebook Social Plugin Settings

Are you tired of seeing targeted social ads on the side of Facebook? It seems no matter whether you are logged in or not, the next time you load Facebook, the ads are relevant to your search and browsing history. Add to this the fact it seems you can never truly log out and users are getting tired of having no control. While Facebook doesn't go out of their way to advertise this fact, you can turn off targeted ads by changing the Facebook social plugin settings.

Since Facebook's last change, users are finding it even more difficult to locate and change privacy settings. If you were like me, the settings you once had under control were suddenly changed back to the defaults without you ever knowing. As soon as I noticed targeted ads again, I immediately went on a search to discover how to change the pesky setting once again. After all, I should be in control of what Facebook sees when I'm not on the site.

What Are Social Plugins

The purpose of social plugins are to allow you to have a more social experience on other websites and target ads to the user. Even after you close the Facebook window or log out, you may notice hundreds of other sites still list you as logged in to Facebook. For instance, when you visit a news site, your Facebook profile pic often shows up in the comment section on articles so you can comment with your Facebook account. Many users would prefer not to have their Facebook account linked to everything. If you want more control over when and how your Facebook account is used, disable social plugins.

Facebook claims no personal information is shared with advertisers or third parties, but this is truly yet to be seen. Considering the fact Facebook released they actually do collect information even after users log out, anything is possible. The more secure your account is, the better.

Changing Social Plugin Settings

Log in to your Facebook account as usual. From the main news feed page, press the small arrow beside Home. This is located at the top right corner of the screen. Select Account Settings. This section provides quite a few settings for customizing security for the account itself. For privacy settings, you must still go into the Privacy Settings section instead of Account Settings.

On the left side of the screen, select Facebook Ads. At first glance, there doesn't appear to be anything you can actually change. Yet another trick to get you to leave these settings alone. The purpose of targeted ads is to gain more revenue by actually targeting those who might be interested versus random people.

Under the second paragraph, click the link which says Edit third party settings. Alternately, if you want to edit social ad settings, click the link after the last paragraph that says Edit social ads settings. Currently, the settings allow you to select whether your information is shown to friends only or no one at all.