Facebook will ask users around the world — not just those in Europe — to review their privacy settings, a step the company took with European users last month as a way to comply with the region’s upcoming GDPR privacy laws, which go into effect on Friday, May 25.
Facebook will ask users outside of Europe to review their privacy settings, too
Facebook is pushing its GDPR efforts to people outside of Europe.
Justin Sullivan / Getty
All Facebook users will see a full-screen prompt in the coming weeks asking them to review their settings for some of Facebook’s important features, like targeted advertising and facial recognition technology.
It’s a similar prompt to the one Facebook gave European users last month, with one important difference: Outside of Europe, users don’t need to manually accept the new terms of service Facebook unveiled in April in order to keep using Facebook. Once a user dismisses the prompt twice, they’ll be automatically opted-in to the terms, a spokesperson confirmed.
Facebook, along with pretty much every other technology company that collects user data, has been changing its privacy practices to ensure that it will comply with upcoming EU privacy laws, called the GDPR. Those laws require companies that collect or use personal user data of EU residents to better explain what types of information they’re collecting, why they’re collecting it and how it’s used. Failure to meet GDPR requirements could result in stiff financial penalties.
In Facebook’s case, the company has promised to use the GDPR privacy standards for all of its users, not just those in Europe, hence this new privacy alert.
Facebook, of course, is still trying to earn back public trust that was lost during its recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, in which personal info from tens of millions of users was collected by an outside data firm without those users’ permission. It was a big enough issue that CEO Mark Zuckerberg answered questions about Facebook’s privacy policies in front of U.S. politicians last month, and on Tuesday, in front of EU politicians. (Tuesday’s meeting left a lot of the EU politicians frustrated.)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
