Meta to Stop Sharing the ‘Publicly Available’ Private Home Addresses

Meta is ending an exception to its existing rules that allowed users to post private residential information of people on its platforms if it was “publicly available” elsewhere. Meta will no longer allow its users to share publicly available private home addresses. Meta’s response comes about a year after the company asked the Oversight Board to weigh in on its handling of private residential information. The Board issued a response in February, calling on Meta to tighten its policies surrounding the sharing of private home addresses over concerns about doxxing.

Meta to Stop Sharing the ‘Publicly Available’ Private Home Addresses

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Although Facebook and Instagram already have rules in place to bar users from sharing someone’s home address. However, the Meta-owned platforms take no action against posts containing “publicly available addresses.” By Meta’s standards, this means any addresses that have been published in five or more news outlets or have been made available in public records. Meta says it will end this exception “by the end of the year.”

“As the board notes in this recommendation, removing the exception for ‘publicly available’ private residential information may limit the availability of this information on Facebook and Instagram when it is still publicly available elsewhere,” Meta writes. “However, we recognize that implementing this recommendation can strengthen privacy protections on our platforms.”

No doubt, this change will bring more security and privacy to the users.

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Source: The Verge