Facebook announced it will remove several categories from user profiles including religious views, political views, addresses and the “Interested in” field which indicates sexual preference. The change will take effect on Dec 1.
This shows Facebook is evolving, as privacy problems have made it less comfortable for anyone to reveal personal information. In the past, people have even entered false details in an effort to fool the algorithm.
“As part of our efforts to make Facebook easier to navigate and use, we’re removing a handful of profile fields: Interested In, Religious Views, Political Views and Address. We’re sending out notifications to people who have these fields filled out, letting them know these fields will be removed. This change doesn’t affect anyone’s ability to share this information about themselves elsewhere on Facebook,” said Emil Vazquez, a Meta spokesperson.
The reason for this is also because Facebook had to remove what it called sensitive information targeting categories such as race, religion and sexual orientation after violating The Housing Rights Act by allowing advertisers to use its systems to use those demographics to tailor housing ads, effectively discriminating against certain viewers.
Advertisers also used this information and targeted ads based on the interest of people, for example, zeroing in on Christmas treats for someone who is celebrating Christmas. Since then, Facebook has removed thousands of other categories which have been used for such reasons.
According to Gizmodo, there’s plenty of data that can still be used which can reveal sensitive details that are supposed to be off-limits. For example, Facebook analyses the demographics of people pictured in advertisements and uses that data to target ads at users of different races, ages, and genders. White people for example are less likely to see ads featuring black people.
Facebook has earned a bad reputation of late and hasn’t been cool for a long time as people leave the platform in droves to use Instagram, its more happening sibling. As a result, the company is in financial trouble, laying off 11,000 employees last week.
Zuckerberg is trying to shift the entire company towards a new concept of virtual and augmented reality called the Metaverse but in the meantime, Facebook and Instagram are their only source of income. So now the challenge is for Facebook to stay relevant in a world of TikTok and other social media trends.
Read More News:
277 selfies after son killed his mom
The post Zuckerberg’s FB account disabled, FB takes sexuality, religion and politics off the profile table appeared first on The Independent World News.