Meta appears to be complying with the Supervisory Board's recommendation, removing the ability for users to share a person's home address as long as it is "publicly available."
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Meta’s response comes about a year after the company asked the Supervisory Board to review its handling of private residential information. The Board issued a response in February, calling on Meta to tighten its policies on sharing private residential addresses due to concerns about doxxing.
While Facebook and Instagram already have rules prohibiting users from sharing someone’s home address, Meta-owned platforms do not take action against posts that contain “public addresses.” According to Meta’s standards, that means any addresses that have been published in five or more news outlets or made available in public records. Meta says it will end this exemption “by the end of the year.”
“As the Board notes in this recommendation, removing the exemption for ‘publicly available’ private residential information may limit the availability of this information on Facebook and Instagram even if it is still publicly available elsewhere,” Meta writes. “However, we recognize that implementing this recommendation can strengthen privacy protections on our platforms.”
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Additionally, Meta is changing its response to posts that include photos of private homes from the outside. The company says it won’t take action if “the property depicted is the focus of a news story,” unless “it’s shared in the context of organizing protests against the resident.” It will also allow users to share the exterior of publicly owned homes owned by “high-ranking officials,” such as heads of state or ambassadors, and will instead allow users to organize protests at those locations. And while Meta says it will continue to allow users to post their own addresses, it won’t follow the board’s recommendation to allow other users to repost them, citing that “it’s often impossible to know whether a resident has consented to allowing another person to share their private address.”
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Additionally, Meta has not fully committed to implementing tools that make it easier for users to report privacy violations. It is evaluating the feasibility of the board’s recommendation to simplify the process for requesting removal of personal information on Facebook and Instagram. The company says it is testing a way to make it easier to find the “ Privacy Breach ” report option . Rather than having to click through two menus and search for the specific option, Meta says it will try making the option more “prominent.”
