#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.

Advance Look At This Week's Key Political Events 10/10/2011

Three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and political theater in Washington. Goldman summarizes: A holiday today, but a busy week starting tomorrow with passage of currency legislation, consideration and likely passage of bilateral trade deals, consideration of the President’s jobs legislation, the proposed Volcker Rule, and continued private meetings of the fiscal “super committee” (no public meetings scheduled yet for this week).

Monday, October 10

  • Columbus Day Holiday

Tuesday, October 11

  • Currency legislation. The Senate likely to pass currency legislation, after two successful procedural votes last week.
  • American Jobs Act. Following Senate likely passage of the currency legislation, the Senate is likely
  • Financial Stability Oversight Council meets…
  • Volcker rule. FDIC Board meets on the Volcker Rule proposed rule and to approve revised projections of Deposit Insurance Fund losses.

Wednesday, October 12

  • House passes trade agreements with Columbia, Panama, and South Korea? The House is likely to pass all three agreements, with the final vote likely occuring on Wednesday.
  • Hearing on tax reform implications for capital formation and corporate investment. In addition to longer-term oriented issues, this hearing might also focus on near term issues like proposals to allow for a temporary tax holiday for repatriation of profits from overseas. In the Senate Finance Committee.
  • House Financial Services Committee votes on capital stock increases for IBRD, IADB, EBRD, and ADB.  The legislation is called “Supporting Economic and National Security by Maintaining U.S. Leadership in Multilateral Development Banks Act”
  • Derivatives regulation. The House Agriculture Committee will review legislative proposals to modify Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, which covers derivatives regulation.
  • National Infrastructure Bank.  The House Transportation Committee’s title sums up the committee majority’s view: “National Infrastructure Bank: More Bureaucracy and More Red Tape.”
  • Federal Home Loan Banks.  The House Financial Services Committee will review the state of the FHLB system, which came under new regulation in 2008 but hasn’t seen the same level of legislative focus as the GSEs or the FHA. 
  • SEC open meeting on Volcker Rule…

Thursday, October 13

  • State, Treasury, and Commerce testify on Iran sanctions.  In the Senate Banking Committee.
  • Industry reps testify on international implications of housing finance reform. In the House Financial Services Committee.
    Friday, October 14
  • Derivatives regulation. The House Financial Services Committee will review legislative proposals to modify Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, which covers derivatives regulation, similar to the House Ag Committee

Friday, October 14

  • Derivatives regulation. The House Financial Services Committee will review legislative proposals to modify Title VII of the Dodd-Frank Act, which covers derivatives regulation, similar to the House Ag Committee

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.

US May Issue Terror Alerts On Facebook, Twitter

“The US government may start issuing terror alerts using Facebook and Twitter, which were thrust again in the spotlight recently as lifelines in Japan. An AP report Thursday, based on a 19-page draft of the plan that the news service obtained, said DHS is working to overhaul the current color-coded terror alert system. ‘The new terror alerts would … be published online using Facebook and Twitter ‘when appropriate,’ the AP reports, ‘but only after federal, state and local government leaders have already been notified.’ Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said the government entrusting something as critical as terrorist alerts to Facebook and Twitter shows how important social networking sites have become to people’s lives. ‘There are hundreds of millions of people using Facebook and Twitter. For many of them, it’s their primary communication tool,’ Kerravala said. ‘That means it’s a great way to get information to a massive number of people. Maybe the best.’”

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