Recapping our privacy efforts — Privacy Awareness Week 2023
By Josh Machin, Head of Public Policy for Meta Australia
At Meta, our commitment to online safety is rooted in our belief that everyone deserves a safe online experience, which is why protecting the privacy and security of people’s data is fundamental to how our business operates, and why we design every product and feature with privacy at its core.
Meta has been calling for stronger privacy protections for consumers — globally and in Australia — for some time. In Australia, we have supported the modernisation of Australia’s privacy law framework, and we have worked to engage constructively with this review over the course of the last three years.
This week marks Privacy Awareness Week in Australia (1–7 May). This year’s theme is ‘Back to Basics’, which aims to raise awareness of the fundamental role that privacy plays in our lives, and tips on how to preserve it.
With that in mind, we wanted to provide an overview of some of the privacy progress Meta has made over the past 12 months. We believe that consumers should have meaningful transparency and control over how their information is collected, used and disclosed, and we’ve released a number of industry-leading tools to achieve this for our users.
Overall, we want people to understand their options when it comes to privacy on our apps. Whether you’re tweaking your audience settings or setting up two-factor authentication, it’s always worth examining your settings on a regular basis, and people can also now set a recurring reminder for a Privacy Checkup to be automatically notified to use the control.
Over the course of Privacy Awareness Week, we will be sharing information to our Meta Australia Facebook Page so you can follow simple privacy and safety tips to enhance user experiences online.
Building Educational Tools
In January 2022, we launched Privacy Center alongside an easier to understand Privacy Policy to give people a place where they could learn more about our approach to privacy. There are two new modules on Privacy Center — one focused on safety, where people can learn more about how they can protect themselves and their information; and one focused on privacy for teens.
Protecting Teen Privacy
As part of our continued work to keep our apps age-appropriate for teens, we introduced updates on Facebook and Instagram that further protect teens online. Now, everyone who is under the age of 16 (or under 18 in certain countries) will default into more private settings when they join Facebook.
Earlier this year, we also announced further restrictions on the options advertisers have to reach teens, as well as the information we use to show ads to teens. A new privacy page has more information for teens about the tools and privacy settings they can use across our technologies.
Increasing Our Ads Transparency
In 2014, Meta launched the “Why Am I Seeing This Ad?” tool, which was designed to provide users with more transparency and control over the ads they see in their Feed.
This year, we updated the ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad?’ tool, to provide more transparency about how your activity both on and off our technologies may inform the machine learning models that shape and deliver the ads you see. To make it easier for people to find our ads controls, users can now access Ads Preferences from additional pages in this tool.
Advancing Private Messaging
We introduced a number of new privacy features on WhatsApp. You can now leave group messages without notifying everyone, choose who can see when you’re online and prevent screenshots on View Once messages.
Showing Our Work
The third iteration of our annual Privacy Progress Update demonstrates technical and operational improvements, including privacy governance, consumer-facing privacy controls, and privacy aware infrastructure.
We also published a white paper that details how we balance privacy and integrity when using people’s data to reduce bad experiences with our technologies.
We will continue to share updates on this important work so our users can enhance their own privacy and safety experiences across our apps.
