Are you seeing Usage or History for Facebook (or other popular social media websites like Twitter or Instagram) in your Circle profiles, but not sure where it came from? Many websites use resources from Facebook for logging into sites, comment sections, or to load other content like videos. Keep in mind that websites love to share web resources. That might show up in your History. And sometimes setting a app or website to "Not Allowed" will have ramifications elsewhere!
My kids don't have a Facebook account so why is it appearing in their Usage?
Whenever you load a website or open an online app, you're making a request to any number of servers to load that content. Circle tracks these requests to report what your devices are doing on the Internet. If you're seeing Facebook or another popular apps or websites in your Usage or History for Circle, but are sure your family member isn't using these, it might be because they're on a website that is using the services related to those apps or websites. Websites will use Facebook's services for a number of things:
- Comment sections: sometimes websites use Facebook for tracking comment on an article.
- Videos: embedded photos or videos from Facebook can appear on other websites or app.
- Logging in: many websites use Facebook to log on to their site. This uses Facebook's web resources to load or create an account.
Because of the way Facebook (and other apps or websites) structure their web servers it's often difficult or impossible to tell if a device is actually loading Facebook, or only loading resources from its web servers. Circle does have some smart programming to lessen when this happens, but it can be difficult at times to tell.
If you're concerned about your family's Usage or History we suggest talking with them and seeing what their up to on the Internet! Load some of the pages or apps they were on and look for elements from Facebook or other popular apps. You'll probably find something related to one of the bigger Internet companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, or someone else.
Setting Facebook to "Not Allowed"
You might at some point want to set Facebook (or another popular app) to "Not Allowed" on one of your family's profiles. If you do so, keep in mind that this might keep certain parts of a website from working properly. For example, if you set Facebook to "Not Allowed", or set a Time Limit for it and that is reached, any website that uses Facebook will no longer load properly. You might also see some problems with photos on Instagram.