Meta’s Privacy Policy

For the final assignment in my undergraduate data visualization course, I was given free rein to create a visualization based on any topic of my choosing. I chose to explore the change in Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms, Inc.)’s privacy policy over time, specifically focusing on word count, volume of hyperlinks, and title. Utilizing the Wayback Machine Internet Archive, I compiled the company’s privacy policy titles and body text starting with the first iteration in 2005 up to 2022. The trend of increased word count and increased link volume gradually emerged in my research, but became staggering when put on paper.

Each bar in this graph is composed of the body text of a given year’s privacy policy. The title of that year’s policy can be found on the top left corner of that year’s bar. Below each bar is a pie chart which depicts the ratio of the policy’s plain text word count (grey) to the policy’s hyperlinked text word count (black). Within each bar, hyperlinked text is bolded, underlined, and highlighted in red (the same goes for hyperlinked headers, plus italicization). With this visual context laid out, we see the stunning evolution of the policy from 989 words in 2005 to 9,089 words in 2022. In 2004, the vast majority of the policy’s word count was plain text, accessible and clear in one place for users; whereas in 2022, the majority of the word count is text which is hyperlinked to other policies, indicating an obfuscation of information. Perhaps most interesting to me is the change in title over time, which distances the company further from any purported value of user privacy, and makes clearer its real intentions: “privacy policy” —> “data use policy” —> “data policy.”

In the visualization, any text beyond the word count bars and policy titles (the overall visualization title, notes, and sources) are deliberately pictured in a subdued color way, blending into the dark background in an effort to focus the viewer’s attention on the data itself.