Paris (AFP)

Facebook announced Tuesday the launch of a new feature of personal data management retrieved outside the social network, first in test phase in Ireland, Spain and South Korea, before a deployment "in the coming months" in the rest of the world.

This new feature should allow users to unlink the data that Facebook retrieves from third-party applications or sites, such as online retail sites, and their personal accounts on the social network.

To date, Facebook has linked this information to the accounts of its users in order to offer targeted advertising.

"We announced a little over a year ago our desire to launch a tool to remove the history out of Facebook and disconnect browsing history profiles of users," said Stephanie Max, product manager at Facebook, during a press conference.

"Today we are launching the test phase in three countries, which will allow us to test the product in different languages," she said.

In practice, the new feature, which will be visible in the privacy settings, does not erase data held by Facebook from third-party applications or websites --- but it allows, in a way, to anonymize them, Facebook can no longer link these data to the user profiles concerned.

This data comes most often from online advertising tools, but also from traffic tracking on applications or sites. They include information related to the device used (make and model, login, etc.), whether it is a computer, a smartphone or a tablet.

"We usually use this data to provide advertising for the products or information we are looking for, but we felt it was important to bring more transparency and control to our users on this type of data," said Max. .

The new tuning tab will detail the type of data received by the social network, and will allow the user to decorrelate them from his profile, either partially or completely.

"We dissociate the data but continue to receive it, they are anonymized, it allows us to do statistics on advertising interactions, for example, but without knowing" what users are concerned, said Stephanie Max.

Facebook tries, with this feature, to respond to criticism of its use of personal data, which had notably increased in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica case broke in March 2018.

The group has since been under the pressure of regulators, both in the United States and the European Union, but also a public opinion increasingly worried about the use made by digital companies of the many personal data collected.

© 2019 AFP