Meta, formerly Facebook, is messing with how it informs users about their privacy options. The company has changed where this information resides and how it is explained several times over the years and now appears to be centralizing some FAQs and privacy controls in one place in its family of apps.
The new privacy center, called privacy center, is a test available to some Facebook desktop users in the US for now, but will be released to “more people and apps in the coming months”. If you are on limited testing, you can find the new privacy information center in the Privacy section of the Settings menu. As it stands, privacy settings are split between Facebook’s Privacy Shortcut and Privacy Check menus, which are far from ideal, but still an improvement on how the platform used to handle these controls.
The new privacy center will divide things into five categories: Security, Sharing, Collection, Usage and Ads. Meta is still promoting the idea of “privacy education” with the changes, a sort of abbreviated way of saying that if you don’t take the trouble to sort all these things out, it’s up to you when the company puts in your personal data. to good use.
Facebook has historically provided users with difficult-to-navigate Byzantine privacy controls, often with the most important settings buried in the menus. This has improved a bit, but regardless of what it says these days, Meta is still interested in keeping its users sharing as much data as possible. This position is amply clarified by the company Obvious objections to Apple’s iOS ad tracking changes, which limited the ability of apps to follow user behavior – a clear victory for consumer privacy.
It’s unrealistic to assume that most people would systemically crawl through this information, but it’s probably worth knowing where everything is, just in case.