Over the years one of the major challenges that have bedeviled giant tech companies is the issue of data privacy policy.
Facebook one of Meta’s platforms has been at the centre of controversy around harvesting users data, though the social media giant has denied these allegations from time to time.
Recently, Meta updated its Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to make it seamless for users to understand how it makes use of their information.
According to Michel Protti, Chief Privacy Officer, Product at Meta, this new update won’t collect, use, share or sell users’ data in any new way.
“We’ve added more detailed explanations in our Privacy Policy, including about how we use and share information with third parties. And we’ve paired it with the Privacy Center and new controls to manage your experience, like who sees your posts and the topics you want to see ads about”. Michel said.
Formerly known as the Data Policy, the new Privacy Policy was necessitated by feedback from users and privacy experts.
“Our goal with this update is to be more clear about our data practices; one way we’ve done this is through additional details and examples throughout. At Meta, we’ve always set out to build personalized experiences that provide value without compromising your privacy. So, it’s on us to have strong protections for the data we use and be transparent about how we use it.”, Michel added.
Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and other Meta products are covered in this updated Meta Privacy Policy, excluding its instant messaging app, WhatsApp.
Data protection regulations have taken tightened measures over the years, thus Meta appears to have explored user-centric privacy design to make its data policy more visible to the public.
The new update from Meta will provide users with:
- more examples of the types of information it collects
- more detail about how it uses information across its products to improve people’s experiences
- more detail about how and when it collects location-related information
- more examples of how it uses the information to personalize people’s experiences
- provide additional clarity around your audience and the settings you have to control who can view your content and activity.
- how it works with partners, vendors, service providers and third parties
In all these, Meta is offering users a new way to control their audience. These new post-level default settings will make it easy for users to control who views their updates on Facebook.
Until now, users’ default audience for updates matches the audience you recently select, which means that if your last posted update was made available to the public, then all posts that come afterward would be public as well.
In these new settings, when a user selects a default audience, it will be applicable to any new posts on Facebook, unless you make changes for a particular post.
This new setting ensures that users are sharing their updates with the preferred people on their timelines.
Users have also been provided with new ways to manage the ads they see. Meta had recently centralized the Ad Topics and Interest Categories into one control accessible on Instagram and Facebook.
This will enable users to set their preferences across ad topics that indicate the target categories advertisers deploy to reach out as well as the content ad.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Meta appears to have been implementing several restrictions on its data policy to minimize abuse.
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