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Meta’s bundling your Instagram and Facebook account settings in one place

Meta’s bundling your Instagram and Facebook account settings in one place

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Now you can adjust your Facebook settings from Instagram and vice versa.

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Image of Meta’s logo with a red and blue background.
Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Meta’s putting your Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger account settings in one place. The company’s rolling out a new Accounts Center that lets you manage your preferences across all your Meta accounts from a centralized hub.

The revamped Accounts Center will live in the settings menu on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, which means you can adjust your account settings for Facebook from Instagram — and vice versa. It also applies to Meta’s standalone accounts that the company started letting Quest owners use in lieu of a Facebook account last year.

Image: Meta

Some of the settings you can toggle include personal details, passwords, security, ad preferences, and payments as well as the permissions you’ve given each app. It doesn’t seem like Meta will put all of your accounts in the Accounts Center by default, so you’ll need to add them manually. Meta notes that you can also remove the 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 will need to remain the same on every app. In other words, you can only retain different ad settings if you use the Accounts Center separately for each app. If you bring in another account that has different ad settings to the Accounts Center, Meta will “adjust these settings to match across your accounts.”

These changes launch today and will gradually roll out to all users on Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram in “the coming months.” This is all part of Meta’s plan to make its apps more connected since first rolling out the Accounts Center in 2020. While Meta initially used it as a way to unify login and payment information across Facebook and Instagram, it later made it possible to easily switch between Instagram and Facebook accounts last year. Meta says it plans on centralizing additional settings in the future.

Additionally, Meta’s updating some of its ad settings, although the details are vague. Here’s what it says it’s doing with those controls:

In addition to bringing Ad preferences to Accounts Center, we’re also making improvements to some of the ad settings controls that can help people understand and manage their ads experience across our technologies.

First, we’re updating our Data about your activity from Partners’ control, which is now called Activity information from ad partners to help people easily understand how their activity sent from other websites and apps is used to power the ads they see. Second, we’re making it easier for people to understand their options when it comes to seeing ads shown by Meta on other apps and websites. Finally, we know people want more control over the ads they see, which is why we’re exploring new ways to give people the ability to see more ads about the things that interest them, in addition to the existing option of seeing fewer ads about things that don’t interest them.

The post doesn’t go into detail about what those new ways will be, but over the last couple of years, Meta has been reworking its ad systems to work with less information collected about each user. The Variance Reduction System that recently rolled out as part of a settlement over housing ads is one example of that, but these settings focus on the information pulled in by others that’s then sent to Meta. It could include information you’ve given to other apps like ovulation trackers or real estate sites or, as the Facebook website explains, reflect data from your real-life purchases that is matched to 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 turn off this setting, the ads you see may still be based on your activity on our platform. They may also be based on information from a specific business that has shared a list of individuals or devices with us, if we’ve matched your profile to information on that list.