Mad at Meta? Don't Let Them Collect and Monetize Your Personal Data

If you’re fed up with Meta right now, you’re not alone. Google searches for deleting Facebook and Instagram spiked last week after Meta announced its latest policy changes. These changes, seemingly designed to appease the incoming Trump administration, included loosening Meta’s hate speech policy to allow for the targeting of LGBTQ+ people and immigrants. 

If these changes—or Meta’s long history of anti-competitive, censorial, and invasive practices—make you want to cut ties with the company, it’s sadly not as simple as deleting your Facebook account or spending less time on Instagram. Meta tracks your activity across millions of websites and apps, regardless of whether you use its platforms, and it profits from that data through targeted ads. If you want to limit Meta’s ability to collect and profit from your personal data, here’s what you need to know.

Meta’s Business Model Relies on Your Personal Data

You might think of Meta as a social media company, but its primary business is surveillance advertising. Meta’s business model relies on collecting as much information as possible about people in order to sell highly-targeted ads. That’s why Meta is one of the main companies tracking you across the internet—monitoring your activity far beyond its own platforms. When Apple introduced changes to make tracking harder on iPhones, Meta lost billions in revenue, demonstrating just how valuable your personal data is to its business. 

How Meta Harvests Your Personal Data

Meta’s tracking tools are embedded in millions of websites and apps, so you can’t escape the company’s surveillance just by avoiding or deleting Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s tracking pixel, found on 30% of the world’s most popular websites, monitors people’s behavior across the web and can expose sensitive information, including financial and mental