Meta

Helping Small Businesses and Developers Protect Their Customers’ Privacy

Rob Sherman, Deputy Chief Privacy Officer

Today we are announcing two new partnerships designed to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) and developers build privacy into their services.

In this day and age, its easier than ever for someone with a great idea to start a new company or develop an app from their kitchen table. But over the past year, we’ve heard more and more questions from small and medium business owners and developers about how to build with privacy in mind, especially ahead of new regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We hope that the free resources we are announcing today for SMBs and developers will give them a basic overview of what they need to think about.

Training for Small and Medium Businesses

In the US we’ve partnered with George Washington University Law School Professor Daniel Solove and his privacy and security training company, TeachPrivacy, to bring privacy training to small businesses. Delivered by the National Consumers League, each session will cover the 10 key things that SMBs should know about protecting their customers’ privacy. These sessions will be taught at Facebook’s Community Boost events in Baltimore; New Orleans; San Diego; East Palo Alto, California; and Edison, New Jersey.

In the EU we are testing a program to help small and medium businesses navigate the GDPR, developed by data protection specialists at the consulting firm Promontory. The program kicks off next week in Berlin and Dublin.

Resources for App and Website Developers

We’ve partnered with HackerOne, a company that advises some of the world’s best security teams, to help educate mobile startup developers in our FbStart program. The HackerOne partnership is designed to help early-stage mobile startups build and grow their apps securely. HackerOne will launch a guide later this year to help developers build security and data protection into their apps from the very beginning. Compiled by some of the world’s best computer security experts, the guide will help developers think about how to protect against common forms of cyber-attacks. We’ll also run webinar trainings and hold two dedicated events for developers to stress test their applications and get advice directly from the HackerOne team.

These partnerships are the first of several steps Facebook will be taking over the coming months to help educate people about privacy, whether they are using Facebook for business, building on our platform or connecting with friends. We look forward to sharing more details over the summer.