Facebook to Let Users Control Their Data From Other Companies--Update
August 20 2019 - 12:33PM
Dow Jones News
By Jeff Horwitz
Facebook Inc. said it would start letting users review and
dissociate themselves from the data Facebook receives about them
from other apps and websites off the platform, a step toward a
pledge of enhanced privacy options Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg
made more than 15 months ago.
The company on Tuesday said it is rolling out a feature called
"Off-Facebook Activity" to let users see information apps and
websites gather on them and send to Facebook, such as shopping
activity, logins using Facebook credentials, or site visits that
trigger tracking signals. People will be able to use the tool to
prevent that data from being associated with their Facebook
accounts -- blocking it, for example, from serving ads in Facebook
for a product they shopped for elsewhere.
The new tool has limits. Users can't delete the outsider data
that other apps and websites send Facebook. It still will collect
that information anonymously -- unlinked to the users' accounts if
they choose -- to provide analytics and advertising conversion
metrics. And it will not give users the ability to see or limit the
full list of data that Facebook gathers from their direct
interaction with the company's products.
"They're trying to do everything they can to fly under the
banner of privacy and still maintain their business practices" said
Ashkan Soltani, a former Federal Trade Commission technologist who
focuses on privacy issues. "Providing uses with the ability to
delete their information when the infrastructure is built to
maintain it all is very difficult."
The feature will be available first only to account holders in
South Korea, Ireland and Spain, but will roll out to all users in
the coming months, Facebook said.
The move is Facebook's latest response to an uproar over its
handling of user information -- including that collected on other
platforms. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that some
apps were sending Facebook deeply personal information without
those users' knowledge, such as users' weight-loss goals or even
the timing of their menstrual cycles. As part of its new tool,
Facebook will both screen apps for potentially inappropriate data
and allow users to report any that slip through.
David Baser, a Facebook product manager who headed the effort,
called the new feature "the most powerful and comprehensive tool
ever launched in the industry for this kind of data."
Mr. Zuckerberg first outlined plans for a privacy control called
"Clear History" in May of last year, amid a firestorm set off by
disclosures about the use of its users' information by Cambridge
Analytica, a data-analysis firm that did work for the Trump
campaign. At the time, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook would provide
"a simple control to clear your browsing history on Facebook" to
let users "flush your history whenever you want." He said it
planned to start with the control over off-platform information,
which Facebook said would take it "several months" to build.
Technical obstacles made that estimate prove too optimistic by a
year and forced the company to add a number of caveats. A more
technical explanation of Facebook's process released on Tuesday
morning says that the company found completely deleting information
from its data stores would be both slow and unreliable. Facebook
therefore created a second version of every account holder's user
ID, called a separable ID. On top of that, Facebook also
established "measurement IDs" so that advertisers can still track
their ad-campaign results.
"We didn't understand all the ways we'd need to work on our own
systems to make this tool come to life," Mr. Baser said, adding
that, after the company figured out what choices it intended to
offer users, it had to figure out how to explain what opting to not
allow the use of off-platform data meant.
The new tool won't offer users any new ability to see or limit
the information that Facebook collects from them while they are on
its site. Facebook already offers some tools to explain why users
see particular ads or posts, but those aren't comprehensive -- they
don't include, for example, passive signals about users' content
consumption, a large category that includes how a user scrolls
through content.
How significantly Facebook's off-platform activity changes will
affect advertisers isn't clear. The tool prevents advertisers from
targeting Facebook advertisements to users based on information it
gathers elsewhere. But Facebook has said that, if enough users opt
out of associating their accounts with such data, the company's
revenue could suffer as its ads become less effective.
"You'll see the same number of ads," Mr. Baser said. "They will
be worse ads."
Facebook said it would continue to work toward greater
transparency about its data collection and usage, but didn't commit
to further actions involving the site's own data collection and
usage practices.
"We'll continue to work our way through the list in a reasonable
way," Mr. Baser said, adding that explaining how Facebook uses the
data it gathers directly "would be ever more challenging to
contextualize" than the off-platform information.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 20, 2019 12:18 ET (16:18 GMT)
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