Facebook Privacy Concerns Highlighted

by Ulrika Lomas, LawAndTax-News.com, Brussels

18 May 2010

The group of European data protection authorities, the Article 29 Working Party, has written to Facebook informing it of the unacceptability of the fundamental changes it has made to the default settings on its social-networking platform.

The Article 29 Working Party is an independent advisory body on data protection and privacy. It was set up under Article 29 of the European Community data protection directives, and examines the application of national measures adopted under the directives in order to contribute to their uniform application.

The letters are a follow-up to the Working Party’s opinion on online social networking of June 2009, and a subsequent hearing with Facebook and two other major social network services operators at its plenary meeting in November 2009. Facebook made the change to its privacy settings shortly after that hearing.

As a result of the change, more personal details, such as name, profile picture, gender, current city, hometown, employment and educational information, list of friends and other pages displaying music and film preferences, can be designated as “publicly available information,” thereby making Facebook users’ preferences much more widely available on the internet.

However, Facebook’s change to its default settings are said to make it more difficult for users to maintain control over those personal details and preferences. The new common default setting is for publicly available information to be unrestricted. Users wishing to restrict the dissemination of their details have a complicated system to work through.

The Working Party held a plenary session in Brussels on May 10 and 11, 2010, and then sent letters to the twenty social network operators, including Facebook, that had signed up to the “Safer Networking Principles for the EU.”

It emphasized the need for a default setting in which access to the profile information and information about the connections of a user is limited to self-selected contacts. Any further access, such as by search engines, should be an explicit choice of the user. Furthermore, it said, providers of social network services should grant users a maximum of control about which profile data can be accessed by a third party application on a case-by-case basis.

The Working Party also raised the issue of data of third persons contained in users' profiles. Providers of social networking sites should be aware that it would be a breach of data protection law if they use personal data of other individuals contained in a user profile for commercial purposes if these other individuals have not given their free and unambiguous consent.

The Working Party’s letter mirrors events in the United States where there has been a new complaint by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), a public research centre, to the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook’s privacy policies. According to EPIC and 14 other consumer groups, Facebook's decision to open up even more personal details as publicly available information is “a violation of user expectations and diminishes privacy”.

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