Meta merged the privacy setting your customers used to opt out with (and what it changes in your ad account)

A woman who refinishes furniture out of a storefront in Irvington texted me a screenshot last week. Her saved website-visitor audience on Facebook had grown from about 4,200 people to just over 6,000 in nine days. She had not touched her ads. She had not changed her pixel. She wanted to know if she was being charged for something.

She was not. Meta changed something upstream, and it is worth fifteen minutes of your time even if you have never opened Ads Manager.

What Meta changed

On June 9, 2026, Meta announced it is retiring a privacy setting called "Your activity off Meta technologies." That setting let a person fully disconnect their activity on other websites, the purchases, the cart adds, the page views your pixel or Conversions API already sends Meta, from their Facebook and Instagram account. If someone had it switched off, that data stayed out of their ad experience entirely.

That setting is gone. In its place, Meta is expanding a second setting called "Activity from other businesses" to do the job the old one did, plus more. The same off-site data now also shapes what shows up in a person's Feed and how Meta AI responds to them, not only which ads they see.

Meta says it is not collecting any new data. The purchases and page visits your website already sends through the pixel or Conversions API have not changed. The change is in how many places inside Meta that data gets used, and how many people have a working toggle to limit it.

The rollout starts in the United States and a handful of other countries in July 2026, with more countries added later. The European Union sits outside this change for now, governed separately under GDPR.

Does your audience get bigger?

Sometimes, yes. The old setting and the new one did not always overlap. Someone could have "activity off Meta technologies" switched off while leaving "activity from other businesses" turned on, and the reverse was also true. Merge the two settings into one and that overlap resets. For some advertisers, people who were previously excluded from ad personalization are back in the pool. That is likely what the furniture refinisher in Irvington saw.

It will not double every account. A shop running ads to a broad Indianapolis audience might see a small bump. A shop with a narrow retargeting list, people who visited three specific product pages last month, will feel it more, because a handful of newly-included visitors moves a small number by a bigger percentage.

Setting	Before this change	After this change
Your activity off Meta technologies	Separate toggle. Full opt-out of off-site data in ads.	Retired. No longer exists as a control.
Activity from other businesses	Controlled ad personalization only.	Expanded. Now also controls Feed and Meta AI personalization.
What data Meta collects from your pixel/CAPI	Purchases, page views, cart adds you already send.	Unchanged.
Where that data gets used	Ads only.	Ads, Feed ranking, Meta AI responses.

What should you do this week?

Nothing about your pixel or Conversions API setup needs to change. You do not need a new integration or a new consent banner. But two things are worth doing before your next ad review.

First, check that your pixel is working. I audit accounts for a living, and roughly one in four small-business Meta pixels I look at has a broken event somewhere, usually the purchase event firing on the wrong page, or not firing at all after a checkout redesign. That already costs you attribution. Now it also limits how well your data feeds Feed and AI personalization, a second reason a broken pixel is expensive.

Second, watch your saved audience sizes over the next month, not only your ad spend. If a retargeting list jumps 30 or 40 percent with no change on your end, blame this update before you blame your tracking. Note it before a client or your own bookkeeper asks why costs shifted.

A pixel that has been broken since March was never going to catch this. Now it also costs you organic reach.

This does not give you permission to collect more data than you already do. It does not change what Indiana's privacy law requires of your website either. If your shop is exempt under the state's small-business carve-out, you still are. Meta changed how it uses data it already had. Your obligations under Indiana law did not move.

None of this requires a new tool or a retainer. It requires ten minutes in Events Manager this week, and a second look next month when the audience numbers move.

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Sources

#	Source	What it backed up
1	Better personalization and changes to controls for your activity from other businesses	Meta's own announcement: the setting merge, what data is and isn't collected, the July 2026 US rollout, and the GDPR carve-out for the EU.
2	Meta Help Center: Activity from other businesses	What the surviving setting controls and how it now extends to Feed and Meta AI.
3	Meta will use off-site activity to customize feed and AI responses	Independent coverage confirming the scope of the rollout and how the merged setting behaves for advertisers.
4	The Indiana privacy law most shops can ignore	Luminest's own related coverage on what Indiana's privacy law does and doesn't require of a small business website.