From Facebook to Partner Agencies:
Today Ime Archibong, VP Platform Partnerships, announced some updates to the Facebook platform, which also impacts Messenger. These critical steps will give people more control of their data, and put stronger protections in place to prevent misuse. As it relates to Messenger, we are currently pausing app review, which means there will be no new bots/experiences added to the platform while we review our policies and make necessary adjustments. Existing Messenger experiences will continue to function as is.
As Ime mentioned in his post, in the upcoming days and beyond, we will:
- Conduct an in-depth review of our platform: We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform in 2014 to reduce data access, and we are conducting a full audit of any app with suspicious activity.
- Inform people if an app is removed for data misuse: If we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them from our platform. Moving forward, if we remove an app for misusing data, we will notify everyone who used it.
- Encourage people to manage the apps they use: We already show people what apps their accounts are connected to and control what data they’ve permitted those apps to use. In the coming month, we’re going to make these choices more prominent and easier to manage.
- Require heightened terms for business-to-business applications: All developers that build applications for other businesses will need to comply with rigorous policies and terms, which we will share in the coming weeks.
- Reward people who find vulnerabilities: Facebook’s bug bounty program will expand so that people can also report to us if they find misuses of data by app developers. We are beginning work on this and will have more details as we finalize the program updates in the coming weeks.
Our goal is to minimize the amount of time this takes, and we will continue to share updates as we have them. On behalf of everyone on the Messenger team, we want to thank you all in advance for your patience, and for all the work you’ve done to make this the awesome global community it is.
Because of this change – 25th West will be removing the bot feature from our Survival Kit until more information is provided. Additionally we will not be able to deliver the bot to any customers who may have requested it over the last 24 hours.
Current clients that are using Facebook Messenger ads will not see any changes at this time, however if campaigns start to be impacted negatively we will halt all messenger campaigns and shift to other options.
