Facebook’s Changed How It Handles Personal Data
Personal information of Facebook users in the European Region will be handled differently, based on their cookie consent, starting last week.
Facebook rolled out changes on 6 July 2021. The existing cookie consent prompts have evolved for people in the European Region who are logged in to Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. The new consent mechanism includes two controls:
- Facebook cookies on other apps and websites – will enable people to control whether Facebook can record web and third-party app data received about them through Facebook’s own business tools.
- Cookies from other companies – will enable people to control whether other companies can set or read cookies from the users’ devices when using a Facebook product.
Going forward, European consumers who do not consent to the use of cookies will not be tracked and their personal information will be discarded, except where the individual’s data is both:
- Received via Facebook’s Conversions API or Customer List Custom Audience tool
- Matched using contact information, such as email or mobile number, rather than a cookie ID or other device identifier
Cookie consent choices can be easily changed in Facebook settings at any time, though, historically we’ve seen that people only make these changes when they are reminded by a specific post or when privacy-related headlines hit the news.
