Is Facebook Breaking Privacy Laws?
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Today a report surfaced in Canada that suggested that Facebook; a social networking website, is breaking privacy laws in regards to personal information being passed onto application developers without user consent. This allegation comes after Facebook recently posted staggering user numbers of around 12 million Canadians alone (over 200 million world wide).
The Canadian Privacy commissioner suggested that the privacy given to users just wasn’t enough and that Facebook’s information distributed to their users about privacy was “often confusing or incomplete”. In addition, she also thinks that users should be given the option to refuse access to personal information that’s currently given to applications.
In order to comply with Canadian privacy law, Facebook must take greater responsibility for the personal information in its care, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada said today in announcing the results of an investigation into the popular social networking site’s privacy policies and practices.
“It’s clear that privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and yet we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates,” says Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
The investigation also raised significant concerns around the sharing of users’ personal information with third-party developers creating Facebook applications such as games and quizzes. (There are more than 950,000 developers in some 180 countries.) Facebook lacks adequate safeguards to effectively restrict these outside developers from accessing profile information, the investigation found.
I happen to agree with the Jennifer Stoddart when it comes to allowing users to opt out of granting personal access to applications. In addition, which I thought was already done, Is the importance that Facebook deletes personal information immediately after a user terminates their account.
I decided to post this article here because I believe this problem affects all of us morally and politically. Should we be pressuring our governments to provide us with greater safety when it comes to online privacy issues? Where should the line be drawn when it comes to what websites can and cannot do with our personal information? I encourage you to leave your thoughts and opinions below.
2 Comments
Dean
July 17th, 2009
at 11:30pm
I’m supprised to learn that personal details aren’t deleted. I had deleted an account for the very reason of privacy ethics and set up a new account very carefully and had been very careful about my privacy options with things I added. Ultimately it was very limiting and I ended up adding an app and when I did I knew I was opening the flood gates and that I was giving in to “may as well add others I find I want as well then”.
As far as applications accessing account info goes, I find that people just don’t care. Most people know that this is the case - that if I write an application and you accept it then I can look at your page. Its on the application agreements, and everyone I’d ever told about this when I was first aware of it apparently thought being able to use Facebook was more important, as did I in the end. I don’t want to be anti-social or feel left out.
Where the line is crossed… well there’s moral lines crossed left and right, but legally its not an argument I can concern myself with. Where the really big moral line is crossed, in my opinion, is in applications that I accept having access to any real data from people on my friend list. Even if no other data is collected than the name and the thumbnail image, and I gather that more of that can be collected however I’m not too sure here, it is too much. The claim that a friend of a friend had made was that they were contracted by a marketing company on a project to crawl and use facial recognition for indexing. While the sky isn’t falling as a result and I can’t think of immediate harm, its still something that is unsettling and creepy and I don’t like it.
At the end of the day though, until our laws are revisited and we no longer psychologically pushed into just blindly accept agreements because we can’t be bothered to spend our entire lives reading and keeping track of that much crap, its somewhat our fault as users, voters, yada yada blah blah blah. With facebook, the agreement on 3rd party applications is actually pretty simple and easy to read I thought. Ethically they’re pricks making a profit from our addiction as a society, but for the most part its not as if its being hidden all that much from the user.
Donald McDiarmid
August 4th, 2009
at 2:35pm
It should be illegal to pass on anyone’s information unless they give permission. There should be a large fine for violating any rules.