With the European Union’s new data protection laws coming into force this year, Facebook has begun preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by publishing its privacy principles for the first time.
The company also announced that it will push videos into users’ news feeds detailing how they can manage their privacy on the social network, while it also recently revealed plans to roll out a new privacy center later this year that pulls together key settings into a single hub. “We’re designing this based on feedback from people, policymakers and privacy experts around the world,” Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, said in a blog post.
The announcement was timed to coincide with Data Privacy Day, an occasion marked every January 28 to promote best practices around online data privacy and security. But more importantly, the news comes just months before the impending GDPR laws are scheduled to come into effect across the EU on May 25, ushering in a new “unified” data protection regulatory framework that also promises to better protect residents’ personal data.
Facebook has published seven core privacy principles, which include helping users to understand how their data is used, designing privacy into Facebook products, and making it easier for users to delete personal information.
“We recognize that people use Facebook to connect, but not everyone wants to share everything with everyone — including with us,” added Egan. “It’s important that you have choices when it comes to how your data is used. These are the principles that guide how we approach privacy at Facebook.”
Facebook doesn’t have a great track record for how it manages users’ (and non-users) information, but the GDPR stipulates that companies can be fined up to four percent of their global turnover if they are deemed to have contravened the new privacy standards. So this is something that Facebook clearly has to pay close attention to. Its new promotional push is designed to show that it’s taking privacy concerns seriously, and is why you may start seeing Facebook blowing its own privacy trumpet in your news feed as part of its latest “educational” campaign.
