Facebook Deputy GC Details Plan to Increase User Data Privacy, Transparency
Facebook's vice president and deputy general counsel Ashlie Beringer co-authored a blog post detailing how the company is attempting to make its privacy tools and settings easier to find.
March 28, 2018 at 07:08 PM
3 minute read
The original version of this story was published on The Recorder
It's been a rough week for Facebook Inc., as the Menlo Park-based company maneuvers through the backlash of the Cambridge Analytica snafu, which exposed data from more than 50 million of the platform's users. Since news broke earlier this month, Facebook's seen an influx of lawsuits and criticism over its lack of transparency and protection of user's private data.
On Wednesday morning, the social media company's vice president and deputy general counsel Ashlie Beringer published a blog post co-authored with Erin Egan, Facebook's VP and chief privacy officer, policy, detailing how the company will make its privacy tools and settings easier to find.
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“Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data,” Beringer and Egan wrote. “We've heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are too hard to find and that we must do more to keep people informed.”
Beringer, who moved in-house to Facebook from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 2013, pointed out that the company has moved the settings to a single location, making it easier for users to find what they're looking for. Previously, settings were spread across 20 pages, according to the post.
The company has also created a Privacy Shortcuts menu, in response to criticism that privacy settings were hidden and hard to navigate on the platform.
“People have also told us that information about privacy, security and ads should be much easier to find,” wrote Beringer and Egan. “The new Privacy Shortcuts is a menu where you can control your data in just a few taps, with clearer explanations of how our controls work. The experience is now clearer, more visual, and easy-to-find.”
Privacy settings accessed through the new shortcuts page will allow users to review what they've posted or deleted, ask for two-factor authentication and control what advertisements they see.
The blog post also pointed out Facebook's new “Access Your Information” page, which will allow users to see what they've shared and manage old posts. Beringer and Egan wrote that the new page is where users will go to “delete anything from your timeline or profile that you no longer want on Facebook,” or to just discover what information Facebook has.
Users will also be able to download a copy of all the data they've shared to Facebook.
“In the coming weeks, we'll be proposing updates to Facebook's terms of service that include our commitments to people,” wrote Beringer and Egan. “We'll also update our data policy to better spell out what data we collect and how we use it. These updates are about transparency—not about gaining new rights to collect, use or share data.”
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