Facebook Makes Privacy Changes

Facebook announces the ways it is going to crack down on abuse of its platform by third party apps that aim to collect as much information as possible from users.Follow Rich on Social Media:Facebook: http://facebook.com/RichOnTechTwitter: http://twitter.com/richdemuroInstagram: http://instagram.com/richontechNEW! You can add the Rich on Tech Daily Update to your Alexa Flash Briefing! Just search for the "Rich on Tech" skill in your Alexa app and add it to your briefing! You'll get a daily dose of tech news each day and a longer show on the weekends!

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Get full access to Rich on Tech at richontech.tv/subscribe

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Facebook cracks down on data abuse. I'm Rich Dmiro. This
is Rich on Tech Daily. So Facebook has spoken out
about the big breach of data and trust when it
comes to their users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a Facebook
post explaining how we got here, what happened, and what
Facebook is going to do in the future to prevent
any more abuse of data. So number one, the company

(00:27):
explained that they really changed the rules back in twenty
fourteen so that this sort of thing can't really happen anymore.
But they're going to clamp down even further. So let's
go back a little bit. When Facebook started. The whole
point of Facebook was that it was different. Not only
did they have all of your social data in there,
but third party apps could use your data to kind
of make those apps better. So if you have a

(00:47):
calendar app, it can populate that app with your friend's birthdays,
for example. But to do that, you had to log
in and give approval to saying hey, you can use
my information and all the information of my friends as well. Now,
in twenty fourteen, Facebook kind of changed that because they
saw that this thing was expanding in a big way
and they said, you know what, we need to make
more granular permissions for this kind of stuff. So if

(01:10):
it's a photo sharing app, we need to get specific
permission from you to access your photos. So they started
making things a little bit more siloed, so if an
app wanted access to your photos, they'd have to ask
for it. If they wanted access to your likes, they
would have to ask for it instead of just getting
everything all at once. Facebook says, even with all these changes,
they've still seen abuse of the platform and misuse of

(01:32):
people's data. So now they're going to make changes to
prevent further abuse. So here's all the changes they talk about.
Number One, they're reviewing their platform. They're going to investigate
all apps that had access to large amounts of information
before they changed things up in twenty fourteen. If they
find that developers misused any information, they're going to ban
them from making future apps, which is interesting. They're going
to also tell people about data misuse. So if Facebook

(01:54):
in its you know, analytics, figures out that some app
is misusing information, they're actually going to tell you users.
Facebook probably had an idea about all this stuff way
before we did, and that's because their computers are constantly
monitoring all this data that's being moved around. So moving forward,
if Facebook detects something like this and they remove an app,
they're actually going to tell everyone who use that app

(02:15):
about it. They're also going to turn off access for
unused apps. This is probably the best and biggest change
they're making. So let's say you take one of those
personality quizzes and then you forget about it, right, you
do the personality quiz or the celebrity lookalike quiz, and
you totally forget that you connected this to your Facebook account.
If you don't use an app within three months, they're
going to turn off that app's access to your information.

(02:37):
That is huge, and it won't affect things like if
you've connected to Netflix or a Pandora or something like that,
because you're logging in with that all the time, but
it will affect these kind of rogue apps that want
to get your information and for as long as possible,
so that's huge. Facebook is also changing the way Facebook
login works. So if you listen to this podcast before

(02:58):
you know that I said I don't really like using
Facebook to log into third party sites. So let's say
you sign up for something like Pandora and it says, hey,
use Facebook to log in. I like when you make
separate accounts for everything. That way things are less connected. Well,
Facebook says they are going to change log in so
that they're going to reduce the data and app can request.
So mainly apps only get your name, your profile photo,

(03:19):
and your email address, but if they want any other data,
they're going to have to specifically request it and get
approval for that. So instead of getting your data, birth,
your like list, your friends list, all that stuff, that
will take kind of a bigger level of approval. Also,
Facebook is now going to encourage people to manage the
apps that they use. So right now you can go
in and, like we've talked about, you can see all

(03:41):
the apps that are connected to your account, but actually
finding that list of apps was not very easy. So
Facebook is going to put a new tool right at
the top of people's news feeds that they can see
the apps that are connected and disconnect those apps very quickly.
There you have it, some of the changes Facebook is
making to crack down on abuse of its platform and
to better protect your privacy. If you want a link

(04:02):
to check out the third party apps that have access
to your Facebook data currently and instructions on how to
disconnect those go to my website Rich on tech dot
tv and if you enjoy this podcast, please rate and
review me in the Apple Podcasts app. That way more
people discover the podcast. Thanks so much for listening on
Rich jamiro Rich on tech dot tv. Talk to you

(04:23):
real soon