How Our Focus on Privacy Impacts Developers

Today, we’re sharing some of the changes we’ve made to our privacy program over the past year and examples of the new ways we’re operating to ensure we protect people’s privacy. At Facebook we are committed to building a safer, more sustainable platform to strengthen trust with people and continue to drive long-term value for our developers. Simply put, protecting the privacy of the people who use our products is a responsibility we share with all developers on our platform.

We’ve made changes to put privacy at the core of everything we do. The new Platform Terms and Developer Policies are a starting point to ensure businesses and developers clearly understand their responsibility to safeguard data and respect people’s privacy when using our platform and tools.

We’ve also continued to refine and streamline our App Review process which will ensure consistency for all developers. This includes changes that help developers build business solutions and tools as well as have additional control over the data permissions they request and the ability to remove them when no longer needed.

Finally, we introduced Data Use Checkup, a new annual workflow to drive accountability for all Facebook platform developers. With Data Use Checkup, developers are required to review the permissions they have access to and commit that their API access and data use comply with the Facebook Platform Terms and Developer Policies in order to keep their API access.

In addition to simplifying and clarifying developer responsibilities, we’re also proactively taking action against companies and individuals who abuse our platform. Earlier this month, we filed a lawsuit against two companies that used scraping to engage in an international data harvesting operation, and a few weeks ago we took action against two companies operating fake engagement services.

These improvements are intended to help create a better privacy foundation for developers and we encourage all developers to build experiences using a privacy-first approach, with principles such as data minimization as their guide.

As a reminder, developers will be required to complete Data Use Checkup within the next several months in order to maintain API access. If you have yet to go through Data Use Checkup, you’ll be receiving a Developer Alert triggering an email to your app's administrators and notification in your App Dashboard, notifying you to complete the process.

To prepare for the process, make sure you've updated contact details and app administrator designation for each app within your organization. You can also learn more on the new Platform Initiatives Hub.

We know user privacy is just as important to our developer community as it is to us. Thank you for continuing to partner with us as we build a safer, more sustainable platform.