ISLAMABAD: Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — currently has no plans regarding monetisation of content in Pakistan.

This was confirmed by Fahad Qadir, Policy Communications Lead, Emerging Markets & South Asia, APAC, while briefing media, here on Thursday.

Earlier this year a team of Meta company visited Pakistan where the matter was raised. Pakistan has around 60 million users, and Meta should take steps to facilitate these users.

In response, the delegation said that Meta is working on the matter, and may start a pilot project, sources in the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication revealed.

However, the company outrightly rejected any plan of monetisation for Pakistan in near future.

The company organised the media briefing session on its approach to privacy for Pakistani journalists here on Thursday.

Arianne Jimenez, Privacy Policy Manager at Meta in Asia Pacific briefed the journalists around the social media company’s policies to protect user data and information safety on its platforms.

Meta representative told reporters that protecting people’s information is central to Meta’s vision of being a privacy-focused communications platform.

She said privacy is fundamental to how Meta business works, and that it is everyone’s responsibility at the social media company.

She went on to brief that Meta is committed to giving people more control over their privacy choices. That is why it has built tools to give people more transparency and control over how their data is used.

Meta offers its users multiple tools and feature to help them take control of their privacy.

These tools include privacy checkup, privacy shortcuts, manage activity, audience selector tool, who can look me up? and the privacy center.

These tools make privacy, security and ad control settings more accessible to the users, besides helping them decide who can see what they share and control how people find them on Facebook.

The privacy center is the educational surface for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger that provides helpful in-depth information on privacy, she added.

Meta strives to help people understand its data practices by giving them more information and controls on its products and over ads, to ensure that personalized advertising and privacy are not at odds.

Meta offers Ad Preferences to let people take control of their preferences by adding, removing preferences set for them based on their profile information and activities on Facebook and Websites or apps used off-Facebook, she added.

Meta tools, “Why I am seeing this ad?” and “Why I am seeing this post” help people adjust their preferences by clicking on any ad or post on their News Feed.

Meta designs privacy controls into its products with guidance from experts in areas like data protection and privacy law, security, interface design, engineering, product management, and public policy.

Its privacy team works to build these perspectives into every stage of product development so that people’s information can be kept secure.

Tools on Meta platforms like security check-up, two-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption and additional accountability for “third party apps” ensure information security, said Meta officials.

Meta gives people more control and choice over their data, and gives them tools for deleting anything they have posted or transferring data to other services because Meta believes that part of having a free and open internet means that people should be able to transfer their data to other apps and services they use.

Meta does not sell any user information to anyone. Partners and third parties who have access to certain data are required to follow rules about how they can and cannot use and disclose the information Meta provides.

At Meta, the process of refining privacy and security system is on-going and the company will continue to invest and innovate to give its customers the best user experience, they added.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022