Meta Places User Centralized Instagram, Facebook and Messenger Account Settings in One Place, the Accounts Center

Meta created a new Accounts Center for Facebook accounts. Instagram and Messenger. (photo: dock. Meta)

JAKARTA – Now Meta Platform Inc., places your Instagram, Facebook and Messenger account settings in one place. Meta launched a new Account Center that lets you manage preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub.

The updated Account Center will be in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, meaning you can customize your account settings for Facebook from Instagram, and vice versa. This also applies to Meta standalone accounts that the company started allowing Quest owners to use as replacements for Facebook accounts last year.

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, advertising preferences, and the payment and permissions you give each app. According to a report by The Verge, it doesn't look like Meta will place all of your accounts in the Account Center by default, so you'll have to add them manually. Meta notes that you can also remove accounts you've added at any time.

While you can use the new hub to adjust your ad settings across Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, Meta says these settings should remain the same across each app.

In other words, you can only maintain different ad settings if you use the Account Center separately for each app. If you enter another account that has different ad settings into the Account Center, Meta will "adjust these settings to match your account".

The changes roll out Friday January 20th and will gradually roll out to all users across Facebook, Messenger and Instagram in the "coming months". This is all part of Meta's plan to make its app more connected since it first launched the Account Center back in 2020.

Meta originally used it as a way to unify login and payment information on Facebook and Instagram, then made it possible to easily switch between Instagram and Facebook accounts like last year. Meta says it plans to centralize additional settings in the future.

Additionally, Meta updated some of its ad settings, though the details are sketchy. Here's what it says with those controls:

“In addition to bringing Ads preferences to Account Center, we've also enhanced several ad settings controls that can help people understand and manage their ad experience across our technologies.

First, we updated our Data about your activity from the Partners control, now called Activity information from advertising partners to help people easily understand how their activity sent from other websites and apps is used to support the ads they see.

Second, we make it easier for people to understand their choices when viewing ads displayed by Meta in other apps and websites.

Finally, we know that people want more control over the ads they see, which is why we're looking for new ways for people to see more ads about the things they're interested in, in addition to the existing option to see fewer ads about things that don't interest them."

The post didn't go into detail about the new ways, but over the past few years, Meta has reworked its ad system to work with less information being collected about each user.

The Variance Reduction System recently launched as part of a settlement on housing ads is one such example, but this arrangement focuses on information pulled by others which is then sent to Meta.

Those settings can include information you provide to other apps such as ovulation trackers or real estate sites or, as the Facebook website describes, reflect data from your real-life purchases that match your profile.

“This setting controls whether we can show you personalized ads on Facebook based on data about your activity from our partners. If you disable this setting, the ads you see may still be based on your activity on our platform. They may also be based on information from certain businesses that have shared individual or device lists with us, if we have matched your profile to the information on those lists.”