Facebook to share more of your internet habits with advertisers

It's no secret Facebook uses your social media habits to give companies information to sell advertising. Based on your Facebook behaviour, the social networking giant sells that information to companies so those companies can sell you things.

Now, it looks as though Facebook wants to use more of your internet behaviour outside of the platform as well.

"We sometimes hear from people that the ads they see aren't as useful or relevant to them as they could be," the company says in a blog post.

Facebook last year introduced online interest-based advertising, ads based on people's use of other websites and apps.

While the company has been doing this for sometime, it says it will now begin including information from pages that use Facebook's Like button and similar social features. "We hope that the ads people see will continue to become more useful and relevant and that this new control will make it easier for people to have the ads experience they want," the company says.

Facebook does provide users the opportunity to turn off these ads, including the Digital Advertising Alliance AdChoices programme, which provides a mechanism that allows you to opt out across more than 100 companies. Additional tools are provided in the advertising controls on iOS and Android devices.

Facebook is today introducing an additional way for users to turn off this kind of advertising from the ad settings page on Facebook. If people choose to use this tool, it will become the master control for online interest-based advertising across all devices and browsers, the company says.