In July 2026 Meta removed the setting that let users disconnect their off-platform activity from their Meta accounts. This changes how ad targeting works.
Meta quietly removed the setting that let users disconnect their off-platform browsing activity from their Meta advertising profile. For advertisers, this means more behavioral targeting data is now available by default — which sounds like a win for ad performance, but it creates a real compliance question for a meaningful subset of businesses.
If you advertise in a regulated space — healthcare-adjacent products, financial services, or any category where CCPA or sector-specific advertising rules apply — the newly available off-platform data may include signals your compliance obligations don’t permit you to use for targeting, even though Meta now surfaces it. This isn’t a hypothetical risk. Advertisers in these categories who don’t proactively adjust their targeting settings could inadvertently build audiences using data that shouldn’t inform their ad targeting under existing regulations.
The businesses least at risk here are the ones that treat every platform-level change as a trigger to re-audit their ad targeting settings against their compliance requirements, rather than assuming defaults are safe. That habit matters more than any single policy change, because platforms adjust these defaults regularly without much notice.
For most businesses outside regulated categories, this change is simply an opportunity — better targeting data, used responsibly. For businesses in regulated industries, this is worth a targeting audit before your next campaign launch, not after.
Audit your Meta Ads targeting — oconversion.com