Desperate to Regain Trust, Facebook Refreshes Privacy Tools

In an effort to gain back user trust and quell the #DeleteFacebook movement spurred by the Cambridge Analytica data leak, Facebook on Wed introduced new privacy tools and promised to make its existing ones easier to find in the coming weeks.

"Last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies and help people empathize how Facebook works and the choices they accept over their data," Facebook VPs Erin Egan and Ashlie Beringer wrote in a blog mail. "We've heard loud and clear that privacy settings and other important tools are besides difficult to discover and that we must practise more to proceed people informed."

For starters, the social network has redesigned the settings card on mobile devices to, hopefully, make it easier to manage your account and see what type of information apps connected to information technology are accessing. These settings were previously spread out across almost twenty different screens; going forward, they volition be accessible from one.

Likewise on tap is a new Privacy Shortcuts carte, which will let you "command your data in but a few taps," Egan and Beringer wrote. From in that location, you'll be able to enable two-factor authentication, review and delete things you've shared on the platform, tweak your ad preferences, and manage who sees your posts and profile data.

The social network besides today introduced a tool called "Access Your Data," which will let y'all review your posts, reactions, comments, and things you lot've searched for, and then delete anything y'all no longer want on your profile or the platform.

Facebook is too planning to brand information technology easier to download a copy of all the information you've shared with the company. That data includes photos you lot've uploaded, contacts yous've added to your account, posts on your timeline, and more.

Finally, await some changes to Facebook's terms of service and data policy in the near time to come. The changes are intended to "better spell out what data we collect and how nosotros use it," Egan and Beringer wrote, calculation that this is "virtually transparency – not about gaining new rights to collect, employ, or share data."

The new measures come after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg final week pledged to investigate all apps that had admission to large amounts of user data before Facebook changed its rules in 2022, and further restrict current developers' access to data.

About Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo

Angela Moscaritolo is PCMag'south expert on fettle and smart home products. Education yoga for nearly x years has helped her in evaluating a range of continued wellness products including fitness trackers, heart rate monitors, rowers, smart scales, stationary bikes, strength preparation machines, treadmills, and more. Angela besides tests smart habitation devices from her ranch in Florida, including air purifiers, kitchen appliances, and robot vacuums, but to name a few.