The culture secretary, Matt Hancock, has been forced to change the settings on his own app after complaints that it was harvesting the data and photos of users.

Speaking to ITV’s Good Morning Britain after criticising Facebook for breaching the privacy of millions of its users, Hancock admitted he received complaints about the way his app accessed users’ data.

Hancock became the first MP to launch an app last month as a way of engaging constituents, but it was immediately criticised for mining data about users including their personal photos.

The culture secretary said the complaints had given him personal experience of some of the issues currently confronting Facebook.

He said: “We updated the privacy settings on that app after getting the feedback that came with the launch. We significantly strengthened the privacy settings because of this sort of feedback.”

Hancock said the row about the data breach at Facebook highlighted the need for the public to have more control over their data.

He added: “The things this really shows is the need for more transparency in the big tech companies, so we know what they are doing with our data and that in itself can bring more accountability.

“So instead of this going on for ages and then an apology only when it comes out in a newspaper, the big tech companies treat data with the respect that it needs right from the start.”

Speaking later to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he said: “Mark Zuckerberg [the chief executive of Facebook] has apologised and said they are going to make some changes but frankly I don’t think those changes go far enough.

“And anyway it should not be for a company to decide what is the appropriate balance between privacy and innovation.” Those rules should be set by society, he added.

On ITV he was asked whether he was doing something comparable to Facebook by launching an app that accessed users’ photos.

He said: “It didn’t gain the access but it did ask for the access, because we actually asked for more consent than was actually needed. That absolutely has been fixed. It demonstrates just how important it is to get this right.”

He added: “Mine is for engaging with my constituents it is not actually about making money, as Facebook is.”