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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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, 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 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 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 real soon