Putting People First: Protecting Privacy and Integrity

At Meta, we often talk about how we use data to maintain and improve the integrity of our technologies. To help explain what we mean by that, we’ve published a new white paper that explains some of the ways we employ user data to create a positive experience across our technologies and the privacy considerations we take into account when utilizing that data.

How We Balance Privacy and Integrity

In this paper, we aim to illustrate the complex scenarios that most large social media companies face and outline how we protect the privacy of people who use our technologies. We share more about the privacy questions we consider as we work to improve the integrity of our products, and we present a few case studies to highlight the challenges we navigate daily. 

For example, in order to train automated tools to detect hate speech, we save past copies of confirmed hate speech. We can save these texts and images while minimizing the amount of personally identifiable information about the people who originally posted them. This design decision promotes safety by building more reliable automation and helps protect people’s privacy by minimizing the amount of personal information we use for training. Other case studies include:

• How we think about privacy when it comes to automated image processing and protecting the privacy of subjects of adult nudity
• How we retain data about people who have committed severe Community Standards violations to help prevent those people from starting new accounts
• How we verify people’s identities while still protecting their privacy 
• How we approach privacy, safety and security together in times of crisis when people may face threats and may lose access to our technologies

Designing Technology With Feedback In Mind

Protecting people’s privacy and safety while promoting their voice can cause tension. But by building products with feedback from people who use our products and advice from experts both inside and outside of Meta, we can often promote privacy and safety within the same design. 

We believe that creating positive experiences means hearing what expectations are and responding with products and tools informed by those expectations. Because we want to hear from you directly, you can reach out to us at privacy4integrity@fb.com through September 30th, 2022, and we’ll take your suggestions into consideration as we continue to find solutions for these critical issues.

We know that privacy, safety and voice all remain priorities when it comes to online regulations and the responsibilities of companies like Meta. We hope that through this paper, we can encourage these conversations across the industry.

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