Facebook promises to give users more control over their privacy... again
Today is Data Privacy Day, and Facebook is using the occasion to try to convince its users that it cares about their privacy.
The social network says that it recognizes there is a lot of work to do to improve privacy protections, but that's not going to stop the company from trying to make it seem as though it doesn't represent a massive invasion of privacy. As part of its latest PR campaign, Facebook will encourage users to review their privacy settings as well as launching the Off-Facebook Activity tool globally.
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Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has penned a post in which he says: "One of our main goals for the next decade is to build much stronger privacy protections for everyone on Facebook". He goes on to set out some of the privacy-related controls and settings that will be launched or promoted in the near future.
Over the next few weeks we'll show nearly 2 billion people around the world a prompt encouraging them to review their privacy settings. The prompt will show up in your News Feed and direct you to the Privacy Checkup tool, which we recently updated. This makes it even easier to adjust who can see your posts and profile information, strengthen your account security by turning on login alerts, and review the information you share with apps you've logged in to with Facebook.
He points to the recently launched Login Notifications feature that was launched recently to provide alerts for third-party logins.
With concern mounting about the ability Facebook and advertisers have to track online activity outside of the social network, Zuckerberg also announces the global availability of the Off-Facebook Activity tool:
As of today, our Off-Facebook Activity tool is available to people on Facebook around the world. Other businesses send us information about your activity on their sites and we use that information to show you ads that are relevant to you. Now you can see a summary of that information and clear it from your account if you want to.
Off-Facebook Activity marks a new level of transparency and control. We've been working on this for a while because we had to rebuild some of our systems to make this possible.