Protecting Your Data on Facebook: Understanding the Privacy Center

Over the years, Facebook has often been in the news for its less-than-stellar privacy posture and practices. To address this, the tech giant is changing how it presents its privacy policy to users.

To this end, it has launched a Privacy Center, a central location that now houses most of the information you need to know about your privacy and how its parent company Meta stores and uses your personal data.

How to Access the New Facebook Privacy Center

The new Privacy Center was announced in a Facebook blog post on January 7, 2022.

The Privacy Center is currently in testing and only available to most US and other desktop users. If you happen to be in the limited test group, you’ll find that it’s easy to access Meta’s new Privacy Center.

Here’s how:

Open Facebook on your computer and click on theAccount dropdown button in the top-right corner.
Click onSettings and privacy then click onPrivacy Center .

This will take you to the Privacy Center home where you can further explore this new feature.

Can’t find it? No worries, Facebook will roll out the Privacy Center feature to all users after the testing phase.

Facebook’s Privacy Center at a Glance

The Facebook Privacy Center provides helpful information on five major categories, each containing specific information about Meta’s privacy policy.

These categories are Security, Sharing, Collection, Use, and Ads, and are all accessible from the Privacy Center home.

You can also customize your Facebook and Instagram settings directly from the Privacy Center home tab by clicking onSettings just beneathOther Policies .

UnderOther Policies , you can access Facebook’s Cookies Policy and additional terms and policies by simply clicking on the drop-down button.

How to Use Facebook’s Privacy Center

To view Meta’s privacy policy on sharing, for instance, simply access the Privacy Center on your computer, scroll down toSharing and click onRead more .

This will take you to the dedicated policy page where you can find detailed information about Meta’s Sharing policy, review your current sharing settings, and control who can see what you share.

To review your Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger sharing settings, simply click onReview your sharing settings then select the app you’ll like to check your settings in.

This will take you away from the Privacy Center to a dedicatedPrivacy checkup page.

You can also learn more about how to clean up your profile, and how to respond to unknown friend requests and followers by clicking on the appropriate option.

To return to the main menu and explore other privacy settings, simply click onPrivacy Center home , go to your preferred category and clickRead more .

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Why You Should Use Facebook’s Privacy Center

If you have access to the Privacy Center, it may be worth your while to spend some time familiarizing yourself with how Meta handles and processes your data across its family of apps.

This is because your data you have every right to know exactly how Facebook plans to store and use the data it has on you and your social media activity.

You may especially want to concentrate on the Collection and Use categories. The former contains some important information about how Facebook collects your data, while the latter explains how Facebook uses the data it collects on you.

Ads is another important category to watch if you’re concerned about ad targeting. Together, they form three of the most important privacy concerns that users have always had with Meta apps, especially Facebook.

Protect Your Privacy

Your privacy is your right and protecting it is mostly your responsibility. You can use Facebook’s new Privacy Center to learn all you can about protecting it and having a say in how your personal data is managed.

Considering Facebook’s privacy history and its recent objections to iOS ad tracking changes, the new Privacy Center appears to be a small step in the right direction. We can only hope that it gets better.