How does Facebook’s Data for Good impact data collection and ads – Privacy Matters
In 2017, Facebook launched Data for Good with the goal of empowering partners with data to help make progress on major social issues. While this work has life-saving potential, it’s critical to protect people’s privacy while sharing data. There were mechanisms put in place to protect your information when they were shared by FB and give you control over your data.
Facebook use to share certain Data for Good mobility datasets with trusted partners like academics, researchers and humanitarian professionals, and built tools to help advance their work. Later since they created a differential privacy framework that further protects the privacy of individuals in aggregated datasets by ensuring no one can identify specific people in these datasets. This new framework allows us to make new datasets available publicly to help inform the public sector response to humanitarian crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who sees my information and activity?
Data for Good shares certain protected datasets with some of facebook’s network of trusted partners. Research partners enrolled in the Data for Good program only have access to aggregate information from Facebook.
What choices and controls do I have?
You can decide if you want to share your location data. The location data used in Data for Good maps is the same information that allows Facebook to show you locally relevant content on Facebook, and you can choose whether you want to share that information in the Location History setting.
How does Data for Good impact data collection and ads?
FB states that they don’t collect any additional data for Data for Good. Data for Good simply aggregates data that was collected from apps and shares it in a de-identified way to help researchers, academics and others address humanitarian crises and social issues.
It claims that some data used in Data for Good is the same data that they are using to personalize your experience on their apps and show you more relevant content and ads. For example, if you choose to share your location information, that information may be used in a Data for Good map or dataset, but its inclusion in Data for Good does not impact the ads or content you see on FB apps.
