News / Society

Facebook announces steps to give users more control over privacy

Wednesday, 28 March 2018 4:36 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 28 March 2018 4:39 PM ]

The photo, taken in Moscow on March 22, 2018, shows an illustration picture of the English language version of Facebook's About page featuring the face of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (AFP photo)

Facebook has announced that it is working on additional steps to give users more and more control over their privacy.

Two senior Facebook officials issued a joint statement on Wednesday, saying that the company had been thinking for some time of new options that could create more privacy protection for users while they are using the network.

Erin Egan, Vice President and Chief Privacy Officer, and Ashlie Beringer, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook, announced the plans in a blog post days after it was revealed that British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for US President Donald Trump's campaign in the 2016 presidential election, accessed data from 50 million Facebook users. Reports said the data loss also targeted voters before a referendum on Britain's exit from the European Union, known as Brexit.

The two said that the new measures would reinforce those announced last week by the company’s director Mark Zuckerberg, who ensured users that Facebook would work hard to eliminate security gaps.

“So in addition to Mark [Zuckerberg]'s announcements last week cracking down on abuse of the Facebook platform, strengthening our policies, and making it easier for people to revoke apps' ability to use your data we're taking additional steps in the coming weeks to put people in more control over their privacy.

“The last week showed how much more work we need to do to enforce our policies, and to help people understand how Facebook works and the choices they have over their data,” said Egan and Beringer.

They said new options would be released on the network, enabling users to have a clearer picture of how they could manage their data privacy.

The new measures include “Privacy Shortcuts,” a menu which gives users the ability to review what they have shared and delete while they could also download their data, including photos, contacts and posts, and move it to another service.

The additional privacy protection measures announced by Facebook comes weeks ahead of the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European Union data protection law which will require companies to give people a "right to portability," namely to take their data with them.

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