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Trust matters to your business. And to ours.
People and businesses come to Facebook platforms to share and connect, and it’s our responsibility to create the best possible experiences when they do. An important part of that is protecting the privacy of people and businesses and being transparent about how data is used.
Mimi
Advertising Interfaces
“We don’t and we never have, but we understand that some people still think we do. Like many other companies, our business is supported by advertising. Advertisers pay Facebook to show their ads to the most relevant people, and finding just the right audience for every ad relies partly on the data that we collect about people. We don’t sell that data to anyone. In some cases, lead ads for example, people can send information like their names and email addresses directly to businesses. These types of ads are still covered by terms that govern data use, and the information is only shared if people voluntarily submit it.
We don’t sell data to developers either. If any developer on our platforms needs identifiable, user-level data access, they must comply with strict policies, go through a review process and get the proper consent from people who want to use their services.”
Vernon
Advertiser Privacy
“We take a comprehensive approach to data security that includes a combination of global security teams, industry-leading technology and strict data policies.
Since there are many types of advertiser data, Facebook invests in multiple methods and measures of data protection for handling and storage. Depending on the data type, these range from regular Service Organization Control (SOC) audits and security testing to full source code reviews and penetration tests to help ensure that we’re protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of your data. We also continue to research and develop new data security technology, so Facebook can always be a safe place for people to connect and for you to grow your business.”
Ryan
Business Tools Development
“No, advertisers cannot access your data, whether that data is in a list, a target audience for your campaigns, pixel activity or anything else shared through a Facebook business tool. Your data is used for your own advertising purposes, and we also use this information to improve Facebook advertising so ads reach more relevant people. We also know that there are some cases when you might want to share data with another business, like sharing a Custom Audience. In order for that to happen, you must actively grant another advertiser access. We will never do this for you.
Occasionally, we also provide reports containing advertising insights and trends. These are meant to educate businesses about what’s working for similar brands on Facebook platforms. It’s possible that your data might inform these reports, but that data will always be presented in aggregate form, and it’s never tied to your business directly.”
Have a question we haven’t answered yet? Ask it here.
What are we doing to protect everyone’s data?
We build privacy into every product, from the ground up.
Building platforms that bring the world closer together comes with the responsibility of protecting data and privacy. We rely on a set of privacy principles and our Data Policy as the foundations for building privacy into all of our products, platforms and apps.
We’re building our tools to higher privacy standards.
We’ve continuously stepped up our standards on privacy to give people more control over the ways they share and connect on Facebook. In addition to outlining our vision for a privacy-focused future, we’re adding more rigor and accountability to the ways we protect people’s data. Our latest privacy framework involves building privacy into every product, adhering to stricter compliance measures and supporting independent oversight to make sure we’re living up to our commitments.
We’re cracking down on bad actors.
To make sure that no apps are misusing people’s data, we cut off data access from hundreds of thousands of apps that did not submit to our review process. We also launched the Data Abuse Bounty program which gives anyone on the platform the ability to report any apps that are abusing our policies.
We’ve strengthened our policies around developer data access.
Keeping data safe sometimes requires taking a few extra steps. We’ve called for all apps to undergo review and added more steps to our API release process, to make sure that developers are not misusing the data they have access to. This means it can take more time for developers to release their apps than it might have taken before, but it also means we’re discovering and removing more apps that don’t meet our Platform Policy.
We’re providing more transparency around data for people and businesses.
We created Privacy Shortcuts, Privacy Basics, “Why am I seeing this ad?” and are rolling out Off-Facebook Activity for people to have greater understanding of and control over their personal data. We’ve also designed a central location where everyone can access, download and manage their data. For businesses, we created the Privacy & Data Use Hub, to explain the types of business data you share with Facebook through each business tool.
See more of what we’re doing to protect data on Facebook platforms.
