When you join Facebook, Instagram, or another social media app, it usually asks you to add your contacts. Doing so helps the app discover and floor mates who’ve accounts, however there’s a tradeoff: your contacts usually comprise a trove of knowledge about individuals who don’t use their apps.

That’s a bummer should you keep away from a given tech platform since you’re frightened about defending your private data. Thanks to your “friends” importing their contacts, tech firms are getting your information anyway. But Facebook has taken an unusually proactive step. The platform has rolled out a brand new instrument that lets non-users delete their contact information and inform Facebook to not gather it sooner or later, as reported by Insider.

The instrument helps you to enter your telephone quantity or your electronic mail. Meta will search throughout Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger to see if they’ve your contacts. If Meta finds your data, it’s going to delete the information and forestall it from being uploaded once more.

The solely drawback? Facebook launched this instrument so quietly it would as properly be a secret. Head to Facebook’s byzantine Help paperwork and also you may finally end up on a page with suggestions for individuals who don’t use Meta merchandise (Meta is Facebook’s mum or dad firm). It’s onerous to think about you’d be digging by Facebook’s Help menu should you don’t use Facebook, and even much less probably that you’d assume to click on on a vaguely labeled link about your rights as a non-Meta consumer.

Meta deserves some credit score right here: this isn’t a characteristic that the majority platforms provide. But for some critics, it will likely be too little too late. The firm confronted a slew of controversies for misusing contact data it gathered by oblique strategies. In 2018 Gizmodo discovered that Facebook lets advertisers goal “shadow profiles” utilizing contact data that folks supplied not directly, both by good friend’s contact lists or through the registration course of for two-factor authentication.

Facebook and its mum or dad firm aren’t uniquely responsible right here, although. Harvesting data that folks aren’t giving up voluntarily is large enterprise. For instance, TikTok, like Meta and tons of different firms, has trackers all over the internet accumulating information on web sites the place you most likely wouldn’t look forward to finding them.

If you’re don’t use Meta’s providers and wish to defend your private data, its’ value taking a couple of minutes to undergo and delete the information. It’s nothing near complete safety from the corporate’s empire of private data, but it surely’s higher than nothing.