Facebook has been scrambling to make changes following reports of a data misuse scandal that resulted in personal information of some 50 million Facebook users being collected without their permission. The world’s largest social media platform redesigned its settings page last week to make it easier for users to find the information that it has collected about them. Facebook today announced that it has rewritten its terms of service and data policies to better explain how and why it collects that data.
The company makes it clear from the start that the exercise hasn’t been conducted to ask for new rights to collect, use or share data on Facebook. It’s also not changing any of the privacy choices that users have made in the past. What that means is Facebook is not changing how much data it collects and why, it’s just changing how much it explains about that to users.
Since the policies haven’t been changed there’s nothing that you really need to be worried about. The new version just offers more details about Facebook’s existing terms of service and data policies. It would be best to go through them, though, seeing as how the last time it updated its terms of service was more than three years ago.
For example, Facebook-owned Instagram wasn’t mentioned in the old data policy at all but it figures prominently in the new one. It details that Facebook might use a user’s Instagram activity such as who they follow to make recommendations on Facebook proper.
Facebook says that it has made this change because “it’s important to show people in black and white how our products work.”
Filed in . Read more about Facebook. Source: newsroom.fb