At the height of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did not immediately commit to applying the European Union"s General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) to the social networking site across the world, saying he agreed with the policies only "in spirit." Erin Egan, Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, has finally shed light on the scope of the company"s GDPR implementation, saying in a blog post that Facebook will exercise the rules" provisions across its global platform.
Egan explains that starting this week, Facebook users will be seeing an alert once they navigate to the News Feed, which will request them to review the details about advertising, face recognition, and information they’ve shared in their profile. The social media giant initially rolled out this experience to users in the European Union and it"s now extending the same to users worldwide.
As part of its GDPR preparation, Facebook will inform its more than two billion users over the next few weeks about how it handles their data collected from its partners for targeted ads as well as their political, religious, and relationship information shared on their profile. Additionally, users will be informed how Facebook uses its facial recognition system and will receive updates to the site"s terms of service and data policy announced last month.
Facebook joins other tech companies in exercising GDPR globally, including Apple - which launched a new Data and Privacy website to comply with the new GDPR policies - and Microsoft, which recently vowed to implement the GDPR policies not only in Europe but also globally.