After various user information scandals, it is only natural for us as Facebook users to be a little more suspicious and disable the location tracking on the app. Does it really throw our data away? It turns out that it does NOT, but now, the app tracks your location only through completely legal backdoors. We're here to explain how this happens and how to turn off location tracking for good.
How Can Facebook Still Track My Location?
When you take a photo on your smartphone, it automatically adds tags of time, date and location to your photo. This process is transparent, and every user can easily see at least the date and time on their photos, regardless of which brand of smartphone they use. While some android-operated devices stamp the date and time directly on the photo, iOS-operated devices only show the time and date when you tap on the photo for more details. This is legal, natural, and happens strictly on your phone.
Here's the catch: this information becomes an integral part of your photo. Think of it like a tattoo you can't see. When you send the photo, its date-time-location "tattoo" goes along with it. Only certain programs know how to read it.
What Can I Do?
If you disabled any and all tracking options on the Facebook website and app, the social media giant will not track your activity on other apps and sites. That being said, from my personal experience, the only thing that really helps with that is logging out from your account on the desktop version.
When you use apps provided by Facebook, such as Instagram and Whatsapp, you still share a vast amount of information. Remember the date-time-location "tattoo" that is a part of every photo on your phone? That's right, Facebook has the programs to read and extract that information in the form of precise coordinates. You can see this for yourself in this link, by downloading your information.
If you want to stop Facebook from tracking your location, take your personal smartphone device and choose to disable the camera's photo location tagging. In the newest version of the iOS operating system, this is very easy. Swipe up the photo in any photo album, and select adjust. You can change the location to a made-up one, or, even easier, delete it altogether.
For android users who want to disable the time and date stamping, you should go to your camera, tap the three lines icon, from there go to settings>watermark and simply disable it.
