Facebook wants to track you even when you’re not using it

Here’s what we all know: Facebook knows a lot about you based on your time on its site — your age, your gender, where your work, your interests — and it uses that information to help companies sell you things. Now the social network wants to also use more of its considerable knowledge of what you do when you’re not actually on Facebook. Facebook said this week that it will soon begin using the data it collects on your use of the “like” and “share” buttons and other social widgets embedded in millions of websites and apps to better personalize the ads it shows you, starting next month. That’s in addition to the information Facebook already puts towards ads, such as your web-surfing habits, your profile details and your activity inside its digital walls. “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,” wrote Stephen Deadman, Facebook’s global deputy chief privacy officer, in a blog post.