Pay attention to Facebook’s new privacy and data use business hub

FACEBOOK hasn’t had a good 12 months so far, but the company is constantly trying to make sure it overcomes challenges — regulatory, business, and ethical — and earns back the trust of its customers and users across the globe.

Recently, the company announced the launch of a new “privacy and data use business hub” and although its something that didn’t get the attention of many, it is something companies should pay attention to.

The hub is essentially just a set of pages on Facebook’s domain that explain its various terms of use and service.

The fact that the company has laid out clearly its business tools terms, custom audience terms, self-serve ad terms, data processing terms, commercial terms of service, and more is quite a strong indicator that the company is now aiming to bring in more transparency. As promised.

However, legally, it also offers more protection to the social media giant when bad actors misuse the platform, its data, or any of its products and services, in any way.

It’s why the new business hub targets businesses, not customers. “[It] centralizes resources that businesses can use to understand how they can protect people’s information when using Facebook,” said Facebook Chief Privacy Officer, Policy Erin Egan.

Two important sections that the hub provides information on are the APIs and SDKs category and the Facebook pixel category.

The first, the APIs and SDKs category lists out clearly all the information that the company logs when someone uses the Facebook Business SDK, including explicit and implicit events such as Add-to-Cart or Likes, and metadata such as the mobile OS type and version, the SDK version, app name, app version, the device opt-out setting, the user agent string and the client IP address.

While it did say that developers can disable automatic logging and log explicit events manually instead, it did also point out that it collects device related metrics such as device model, carrier, total disk space, and remaining disk space.

All of this might help businesses better assess their rights and responsibilities when it comes to using data from the Facebook Business SDK.

In terms of Facebook pixel, clarification has been provided that the tool is essentially a small piece of JavaScript code that an administrator of a Facebook Ads account adds to their website in order to optimize their ads, report on conversions across devices and create Custom Audiences of website visitors to use in Facebook ads.

Facebook also said it uses information obtained from websites that install pixels to improve its ads and listed the kinds of data that the platform actually collects — such as data from form fields, button click data, and others.

At the end of the day, it is a step in the right direction for Facebook. There’s definitely more that needs to be done, but new initiatives every day show that the company is keen on making amends and improvements.

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