#Facebook Facing a $138,000 Fine For Holding Deleted User Data - #FollowThisExample

 

Facebook‘s Ireland offices are being audited, as the company is facing a possible €100,000 ($138,000) fine for retaining data deleted by users, The Guardian reports.

The case began when a 24-year-old Austrian law student, Max Schrems, asked Facebook for a copy of all his personal data in June. Facebook complied, sending him a CD containing 1,200 pages of data, including his likes, “friend” and “defriend” history, and chat logs.

The problem? Schrems had deleted some of the data returned to him from his profile, yet Facebook retained his information.

Schrems proceeded to start an initiative called Europe vs. Facebook, and filed 22 individual claims about the social network’s practices.

The complaints include some of the ways Facebook keeps deleted user data, and highlight some of Facebook’s Terms of Service and business shortcomings.

“Postings that have been deleted showed up in the set of data that was received from Facebook,” says one complaint. “The privacy settings only regulate who can see the link to a picture. The picture itself is “public” on the internet. This makes it easy to circumvent the settings,” says another.

According to ZDNet, the complaints have already yielded results: Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has called for an audit of Facebook’s offices, which will take place before Christmas.

Should the DPC find Facebook has breached Irish data protection law, it can ask the company to change the way it handles personal data. Should Facebook fail to comply, it could face a fine of up to €100,000 ($138,000). Of course, for Facebook, the negative publicity could be more damaging than the amount of the fine.

In February 2009, Facebook changed its Terms of Service, giving itself the right to use or modify user data in any way it wants, even if a user quits the service.

This subtle change in Facebook’s TOS prompted a huge public backlash, ultimately forcing Facebook to backpedal a little. In an elaborate blog post, Mark Zuckerberg explained why the company feels it needs to retain a copy of user’s data.

While some of his arguments are valid — for example, it’s very tricky to permanently delete a message you’ve sent another user, as the other user also has the right to keep his/her copy — this latest incident might once again spark complaints from users feeling Facebook has granted itself too many liberties with their data.

With the public roll-out of Timeline on the horizon, many users are bound to have a slew of new privacy concerns. If you are already using Timeline, have you found any of your data you thought was hidden or deleted appearing publicly? Please share your experiences below.

Anti-corporate activists claim Facebook is purging their accounts | The Raw Story

Dozens of Facebook accounts with a political orientation have been removed or suspended in the last day, according to British activists.

Many of the pages are associated with UK Uncut, which has been at the forefront of protests against both draconian cuts by the British government and tax avoidance by major corporations. The group is known for its use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking services to organize its actions.

Guy Aitchison, who blogs at openDemocracy, told the Guardian, “I woke up this morning to find that a lot of the groups we’d been using for anti-cuts activity had disappeared. The timing of it seems suspicious given a general political crackdown because of the royal wedding.”

“There appears to be a political purge of Facebook taking place,” Aitchison wrote at his own blog on Friday. “Profiles are being deleted without warning or explanation. In the last 12 hours, Facebook has deleted over 50 sites. It may well be that these groups are technically in violation of Facebook’s terms of agreement … but the timing – on the royal wedding and May day weekend – is deeply suspicious. We don’t know for certain, but this purge of online organising groups could be linked to the wider crackdown on protest by authorities in Britain.”

The crackdown to which he referred included the arrest on Friday of a professor and a street theater group who had planned a “zombie wedding” and a mock execution to coincide with the royal nuptials.

Facebook has since responded to the activist groups with an email stating that “Facebook profiles are intended to represent individual people only. It is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to use a profile to represent a brand, business, group, or organization. If you would like to continue representing your organization on Facebook, we can convert your profile to a Page.”

Commenters at Aitchison’s blog, however, remained convinced that Facebook’s action was “definitely a selective culling because there are still plenty of Facebook profile being used by groups” and because “they were all taken down at once with no explanation or warning.”

DemandProgress.org has launched a campaign linking the latest incident to the recent blocking of the Facebook page of technology news website Ars Technica and calling on Facebook to “stop censoring political content right away.”

The Ars Technica page, which was taken down for an alleged copyright violation, has since been restored, but without any clear explanation from Facebook.

As Obama visits Facebook in California, trouble brews in DC about hints of sucking up to China

As President Barack Obama visits Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters today to hold a “town hall” meeting on the economy with the site’s users, Facebook is facing a challenge back in Washington DC as it tries to expand into China.

The big question: How  will Facebook handle its role as a global public square for dissidents if it enters China and other countries with little tolerance for dissent. (See the video below).

The government in China has been cracking down on dissidents- in response to the uprisings in the Middle East, spurred on by social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal  Facebook officials in Washington suggested the company might be willing to play by China’s rules — a stance that could raise hackles in Congress.

With Facebook talking to potential Chinese partners  ”Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the top-ranking Republican on the Senate’s human- rights panel, did not mince his words. “Blocking content in some countries— but not others—would deeply damage Facebook’s brand and raise troubling questions about its commitment to human rights and Internet freedom,” he said.

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