By Stephen Deadman, Global Deputy Chief Privacy Officer

With a global community of 1.5 billion people, we know that people will only trust Facebook if we do a good job of protecting their information. Efforts to harmonize regulatory approaches to privacy and data protection across the world play a vital role in realizing this goal, and the publicati...on of the Privacy Bridges report on Wednesday is significant step forward.

This initiative, spearheaded by Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, identifies common ground between the EU and US privacy regimes and proposes practical transatlantic solutions to strengthen privacy protections for individuals. The report is the result of several meetings of experts in the EU and US over the past two years and comes just two weeks after the European Court of Justice struck down the EU/US Safe Harbour, which has generated significant debate about how legal systems in these two regions work together. While the report holds particular importance for the EU and US as the world's biggest trading bloc, it may offer essential insights for tackling the interoperability of systems for protecting people's privacy across other parts of the world.

We commend the report's recognition of commonly held values in the EU and US: upholding human rights, advancing the rule of law, increasing transparency of data processing, facilitating the assertion of privacy rights by individuals, and restraining government surveillance. The report is also frank and honest about the areas where both regimes can improve, and how adoption of best practices can promote privacy on both sides of the Atlantic. We also applaud the report's emphasis on the vital role that multi-stakeholder efforts play in developing practical, sustainable and meaningful privacy protections. Success in “bridging” EU and US approaches to privacy will require continued participation from regulatory authorities, civil society, industry and academia alike.

The report prioritizes several areas where organizations can enhance privacy protections. We share the authors' view that transparency, control and accountability are core to advancing the protection of personal data. These areas have been a big focus for Facebook, as we have sought to put people in control of the information they share, to provide greater transparency into how information is used, and to build the organizational structures that ensure respect for privacy is baked into everything we do.

Facebook was privileged to be invited to provide input to the Privacy Bridges experts group during its deliberations. We look forward to participating in this year's International Privacy Conference in Amsterdam next week and working with, and learning from, regulatory authorities, industry peers, civil society and privacy scholars to build a more harmonized approach to privacy and data protection across the Atlantic and beyond.

By Stephen Deadman, Global Deputy Chief Privacy Officer

Atlas and LiveRail are Facebook companies that help advertisers and publishers show relevant ads on websites across the internet and in apps on your phone. Today we're updating their privacy policies to reflect recently announced new features of these services and to make the policies easier to understand.

One of the top things we hear from people i...s that they want ads they see to be more interesting – and at the same time, we want to improve ads to make them as relevant as possible. With these updates, we want to offer explanations of the changes and how the Atlas and LiveRail advertising technology works.