Facebook Updates Privacy Policy With More Specific Info

Facebook Updates Privacy Policy With More Specific Info

 Facebook on Friday updated its privacy policy to provide more specific details about what the social network does and does not do with your personal information.

The move comes after Irish data protection officials in December ordered Facebook to be more transparent about features like facial recognition.

Facebook said the changes add more examples and detailed explanations about its privacy policies.

"For example, we include additional tips, marked with a light bulb so you can find them easily," Erin Egan, Facebook's chief privacy officer, wrote in a blog post. "We've added new links to our Help Center. We created a new section explaining how we use 'cookies' and similar technologies and updated the corresponding explanations about cookies in our Help Center."

"We also provide more information about how we use data to operate Facebook, to advertise, and to promote safety and security for Facebook users," she continued. "These examples and explanations are designed to help you understand what the Data Use Policy means in practice."

Egan touted some of the other updates Facebook has made in recent months, including notifications about the rollout of Timeline, an Activity Log that allows you to see everything you've posted to Facebook in one spot, and administrative changes to make things easier to find.

Facebook is giving users time to review and provide feedback on the changes via its Site Governance page. Egan will also appear on a Monday webcast at noon Eastern to answer users' questions.

The Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) got involved last year after a June controversy over its facial-recognition technology. The feature is intended to allow for quick photo tagging; if you upload 200 photos from one party, for example, Facebook can detect certain faces and offer up suggestions ("Is this Chloe?") to speed up the tagging process. The social network rolled out the option without much warning, however, prompting security concerns.

Meanwhile, a 24-year-old Austrian law student, Max Schrems, asked Facebook to turn over the data it had stored about his Facebook activity and was shocked to find just how much information that included. Since issues concerning Facebook users outside of the U.S. and Canada are handled by Facebook's Dublin office, Schrems filed 22 separate complaints with the DPC, asking them to investigate.

The DPC agreed, and by December, Irish data commissioner Gary Davis found that "there should be room for improvement in how Facebook Ireland handles the personal information of users."