Facebook is opening several cafés in London to encourage privacy checks

Several official Facebook cafés are set to open in London in a bid to encourage privacy checks.

The social media brand’s flagship Facebook café will be a pop-up coffee shop located inside The Attendant on Great Eastern Street and will be open on August 28 and 29.

The London pop-up will be one of five Facebook Café’s appearing in the capital and across the UK between August 28th and September 5th, to help encourage British Facebook users to run simple privacy check-ups. The café will also give out free drinks from its select menu to anyone who takes part in a privacy checkup.

According to Facebook, the café is a response to a recent poll revealing 27 per cent of Londoners do not know how to customise their social media privacy settings.

Privacy issues

Despite the initiative to have a more user-friendly and transparent platform, Facebook itself has reportedly struggled to protect user details, with ethics and protocol being questioned following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which the tech giant was allegedly accused of mishandling user data; and last month, the US Financial Trade Commission (FTC) announced it was pursuing a path to fine Facebook $5billion for its privacy violations.

Additionally, this week, it was reported that Facebook paid “hundreds of workers… to transcribe voice recordings of Facebook”.

Facebook became the latest company to confirm it had used third-party workers to listen into to Facebook Messenger conversations, something previously confirmed by tech giants Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon.

But Facebook responded by stating that the practice had been halted “more than a week ago”. Workers were provided with audio of user’s conversations without being told how the recordings was obtained, according to Bloomberg, who broke the news.

Facebook claimed the recordings were being transcribed manually to improve artificial intelligence systems used to automatically transcribe conversations, and added this had been done only when users had opted in to transcription services and given permission for microphone access.