Facebook's First CES Reveal In Years Is a Privacy Tool That Falls Short

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: At CES 2020, Facebook plans to show off an innovative new concept for the company: privacy. It will have a booth at the tech show for giving demos on its updated Privacy Checkup tool, which it announced Monday morning. This is the first significant update to Facebook's Privacy Checkup tool since it was created in 2014, four years before its major Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal broke. Following the scandal, in which an app harvested data from up to 87 million people without their knowledge, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress on how the social network planned to protect people's privacy. Since then, Facebook has made a public push on privacy, opening pop-up booths in cities around the world to teach people about their privacy settings on the social network. At CES, Facebook will be bringing that experience to Las Vegas. The update to Privacy Checkup expands its categories from three to eight different groups, and four topics: Who can see what you share; How to keep your account secure; How people can find you on Facebook; and Your data settings on Facebook. The new tool gives people one central tab where they can change settings such as reviewing who can see your profile and send you friend requests, enabling two-factor authentication and reviewing permissions settings for third-party apps. Facebook said it introduced these categories based on issues that its users were most concerned about. The Data Settings category, for example, provides a convenient location where people can revoke permissions and access for apps and websites for which they've used Facebook to log in. But these updates don't address data privacy issues that lawmakers have been raising about Facebook for years. "The core of lawmakers' privacy frustrations about Facebook aren't about who can send you friend requests; they're about data brokers and advertisers who can target entire groups of people using the social network," the report adds. "Many of the privacy concerns surrounding Facebook are about privacy from the social network, not on it, which is what the Privacy Checkup tool is mainly addressing." "We need to educate the public more on the different types of privacy concerns," said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies social media. "There's user interface issues, like how I'm being tagged, and greater privacy concerns that only regulators can get insight to, like how your profile is used to algorithmically shift what you see in your newsfeed."

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