It will soon be 19 years since Facebook launched. Almost two decades, during which social networks have changed from a minority and still starting to become one of the main means of communication and information for millions and millions of people around the world. A few years during which we have seen their perception change, the success of many, the collapse of even more and the unfathomable presence of those who at the time seemed to be the most important in the world.

I am of course talking mainly about Facebook and Twitter. As for the second, in recent weeks we have witnessed a truly bizarre and grotesque process that deserves the best of the fascinating invention of Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán. Now that this network has become a permanent fire since the arrival of Elon Musk, it does not mean that it was a happy arcade before. On the contrary, the service was already suffering from quite a few problems, such as hate and misinformation, which, yes, at least those in charge were trying to solve.

Facebook, for its part, experienced a golden age, a time when its numbers weren’t growing but looked like a spaceship flying. Those were naive times in which many users of the social network did not hesitate to publish some quite private aspects on it. Sexuality, political ideology, religious beliefs… information, all of which today enjoys enormous levels of protection by regulations like GDPR, but which at the time was publicly revealed in user profiles or at least uploaded to the platform.

Facebook’s reputational crisis caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal changed everything. Suddenly, many people began to question whether it made sense to upload such information to Facebook, either to make it public or to keep it private. Suddenly, as if by the impulse of a coup, millions of users began to delete said information from their profiles, and at the same time, the use of social network services gradually but steadily decreased.

Starting December 1, 2022, Facebook will remove religious views and information about “interests” from profiles. pic.twitter.com/SKjSrtwUwm

—Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) November 16, 2022

A little late now (but hey, better late than never) Facebook has decided to remove certain information from its users’ profilesas Found out social media consultant Matt Navarra. Specifically, Navarre lists religion and sexuality (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, etc.), but a later Facebook statement also adds the user’s political ideology and address to the list.

It’s well known that Facebook has used this data for years to offer an impressive level of segmentation that advertisers use to fine-tune their campaigns. caused more than one controversy due to its tortious use. Now, with this move, Facebook intends to clean up its image a bit as part of its plans to “return to cool” and see if it can restore, if only partially, the more-than-shattered trust of its users.

“As part of our efforts to make Facebook easier to navigate and use, we are removing some profile fields: Interest in, Religious Beliefs, Political Beliefs, and Address.” said Emil Vázquez, spokesperson for Meta. “We are sending a notification to people who have filled in these fields that these fields will be removed. This change does not affect anyone’s ability to share this information about themselves elsewhere on Facebook.“.

From today’s perspective, the degree of innocence (if not naivety) with which many users acted on social networks such as Facebook in its early years is surprising. However, it should be remembered that those were very different times (I repeat, almost 20 years have passed) and that the perception of security and privacy has evolved a lot and very well in that period. So it’s not so much what we did in the past that matters, but rather that nobody (or practically nobody, as there are always exceptions) can think of doing it again in the present.