Meta to cease sharing of private residential info of public accounts

Facebook’s parent company Meta has announced to have accepted Oversight Board’s recommendations on restricting users to share another user’s residential address if the account is “publicly available”. The move comes a year later after Oversight Board’s filed a request, calling on Meta to tighten its guidelines around sharing private residential addresses over doxing concerns.

For those unaware, doxing involves revealing a person’s private information such as email address, name, phone number, and residential address, typically with malicious intent. Meta claims that barring users from sharing private residential addresses will also help in strengthening the company’s privacy policies.

It is worth noting that although removing this information from Facebook and Instagram may limit the information on these platforms, it could still be available on other social media platforms. Facebook and Instagram already have policies set to bar users from sharing users’ residential addresses, unlike Meta standards that involve any addresses that are published across 5 or more news platforms or have been made publicly available.

Getting into the details, the company also clarified that the exception won’t include the pictures that are outside the private homes nor object if the focus of the picture is to protest the owner’s residence.

Meta confirmed that it would allow users to share images of renowned residences belonging to high-ranking officers such as ambassadors or heads of state, citing that it is impossible to know whether a resident has been permitted to allow others to share their addresses.

Notably, Meta is yet to fully commit to implementing tools that can streamline the reporting process for privacy violations. But the company claims to be testing a way to make privacy violation reporting options more prominent.

The Oversight Board has recommended creating a specific channel to address doxing reports as well, although Meta has declined to act, claiming that it is actively creating new channels for user support. The company claims to already have partners across 850 organizations for victim support.

Source Credits –

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/10/23019046/meta-no-longer-allow-private-residential-address-doxxing-facebook-instagram-oversight-board