Social networking site Facebook has been at the receiving end of public lash over how it handled the user data over the years. The criticism started off two weeks back and a revelation that the data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica had worked on the targeted election campaigns by using the personal and private Facebook data. Now Facebook has announced a new set of changes which will help the users to find and save their privacy settings and also download and delete all the data that was collected through the social network.
Many of these features already existed on the social network but now the social network is making it more prominent for an average user to find and bring it to use. Facebook would have anyways had to do a lot of such work in the wake of the new GDPR requirements which will soon be in place in Europe. The recent changes do not indicate anything which says that the social network plans to do anything different in terms of the information that it is gathering and using to run its service. The new changes will include more clarity on the data policy on the social network.
Erin Egan, the chief privacy officer at Facebook says, “These updates are about transparency – not about gaining new rights to collect, use, or share data”. However, there are already people who are downloading their data on Facebook in the past week without the recent update. The social network has said that for people who have decided to stay back on Facebook there are a few changes that they have brought in place.
The settings menu has been redesigned for mobile with all the primary controls brought on one screen. People who do not wish to dive in to the settings, Facebook will put a new item on its menu directly linking the users to privacy settings. People can access their information through a secure link and will make it easier to download as well as delete data.
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