Pardon the Interruption: It’s About Your Privacy

By Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer

Starting this week, we’re asking everyone on Facebook to review important information about privacy and how to control their experience. People have told us they want clearer explanations of what information we collect and how we use it.

After updating our data policy and making our privacy controls easier to find, we’re now showing people an alert as they visit News Feed so they can review details about advertising, face recognition, and information they’ve chosen to share in their profile. We introduced a similar experience in the European Union as part of our preparation for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and now we’re making it available everywhere.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll show people a customized message that puts the following information in front of them:

How we use data from partners to show more relevant advertising Political, religious, and relationship information they’ve chosen to include on their profiles How we use face recognition, including for features that help protect your privacy Updates to our terms of service and data policy that we announced in April

People will see a summary of the choices they’ve already made and won’t see information about features they’ve already disabled or decided not to use. For example, if you’ve already disabled face recognition or ads based on data from partners, we won’t ask you to turn them on.

We will reflect the choices they’ve already made on the intro screen.

Regardless of the choices you make now, you can change your mind at any time by visiting Settings or Privacy Shortcuts. You’ll hear more from us about privacy in the coming months and have opportunities to share feedback, including our work on Clear History.