Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today his company intends to implement Europes beefed-up privacy standards across its entire global network.
The move would give Americans and other Facebook users outside of the European Union access to some of the worlds toughest data protection rules, including the potential for people to revoke how data is used by the social network if they believe their digital information is being misused.
“We intend to make the same settings available everywhere, not only in Europe,” Zuckerberg told reporters.
“We need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with the different laws and different places,” he added. “But let me repeat this, well make all controls and settings the same everywhere, not just in Europe.”
His commitment would go significantly further than existing privacy standards available in the U.S., where congressional efforts to pass an online privacy law have floundered. It also marks a change from Facebooks previous plans, in which only part of Europes data protection overhaul was expected to apply outside the EU. Europes new privacy standards come into place on May 25.
Last month, Emily Sharpe, a London-based privacy and public policy manager at Facebook, said that certain features designed to comply with Europes upcoming rules would be rolled out globally, but other regulatory steps required to gain users online consent, particularly around the collection of their sensitive data like political or religious affiliation, was expected to only apply within the European Union.
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