Facebook Proposes Updates To Its Data Use Policy

Late last year, Facebook held its final site governance vote with only a little over 650,000 users voting for or against changes to its newly proposed data use policy. The social network required that 30 percent of its 1 billion plus users vote for it to matter, and that obviously didn’t happen. Facebook now moves ahead with changes to its various privacy policies, but it still seeks input from the community before implementing them.

Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, announced today some proposed changes to Facebook’s data use policy. The newly proposed policy alters definitions and simplifies certain sections of the policy to make it easier for the layman to understand.

You’ll find the three major changes to Facebook’s data use policy below:

Your information. We clarified that you share information with Facebook when you communicate with us, like when you send us an email.

Other information we receive about you. We simplified the explanation for how we receive information and clarified the types of information we receive when you use or run Facebook, including from your devices, such as your IP address or mobile phone number.

Personalized ads. We rewrote the entire advertising section to better explain what we thought was important for people to know about how we use the information we receive to provide relevant ads to people on and off Facebook.

Alongside the changes to its data use policy, Facebook is also updating its statement of rights and responsibilities. Most of these are simply changes to definitions, but it does include one important update that clarifies how Facebook uses your information for sponsored stories as a result of Facebook’s latest legal settlement over the matter.

As part of a legal settlement, we agreed to further explain how we may use your name, profile picture, content and information in connection with ads or commercial content. We included an example of how these ads work and explained that when you limit your audience, we’ll respect that choice. We also added a provision stating that minor users must represent that a parent or guardian has consented to this section of our terms, on their behalf.

If you want to know more, check out Facebook’s super informative breakdown of all the proposed policy changes.

Facebook may have killed the site-wide governance vote, but it does seem like the social network is serious about keeping its users in the know about any and all changes to its various policies. Add that to Facebook’s newfound interest in transparency regarding government data requests and we may have a privacy friendly Facebook just yet.

[Image: Facebook]