Facebook Updates Access Your Information Tool to Better Explain Data Usage to Users

Sieeka Khan, Tech Times 12 January 2021, 06:01 pm

Facebook has started an update to its Access Your Information tool with the goal of making the tool easier to use and navigate and to better explain how and why the data is used.

The new version of the said tool has been visually redesigned, and further breaks down the viewable information across eight categories instead of two categories.

Facebook updates tool

The said tool was first introduced in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been compromised.

After that event, the social media giant made numerous changes to how its platform apps worked and created new features to make it easier for users to find and to utilize the privacy settings.

Also Read: You Can Now Have Admin Privileges In A Messenger Group Chat

One of the new additions was the Access Your Information tool, which offers users a new and secure way that they can manage their posts, comments, reactions and other things that they have searched for.

The idea is you could use the tool to pull up your information, then you can delete any post from your profile, timeline and anything that you no longer want on Facebook.

New categories

Before the update, the tool offers only two categories of data, they are the Your Information and Information About You options.

The new version has eight different categories. They are Friends and Followers, Preferences, Your Activity Across Facebook, Logged Information, Ads Information, Personal Information, Security and Login Information and Apps and Websites Off of Facebook.

Within the categories, the information is further brown down into subcategories. This can make it easier for users to drill down to the sort of data that they want to view and remove.

Also, the tool has Search functionality wherein you can find data categories by searching them, like by typing in location in order to pull up information about your location history.

The tool will also now better explain how the data Facebook has can be used to personalize your experience on its platform. For example, you may see your location is one of the signals that was used to target you with an advertisement for a food delivery app.

Facebook states that the changes were created based on how people had been using the tool, especially in terms of what categories of data that they were clicking on, according to MacRumors.

With that said, the update on the tool is notable. There is a massive effort at Apple to better highlight to App Store users which apps collect the personal data to users and is then used to track them. Apple is now requiring apps to add App Store privacy labels and will soon require apps to get consent from users for tracking.

In response to this push, Facebook launched a website and ran full-age advertisements in newspapers to gain support for its personalized advertising business, noting the harms it states will come to small businesses as a result of Apple's changes.

This updated tool will help make Facebook's case to users by explaining why the data and the advertisements could be useful.