Facebook now offers more disclosure to its users
Facebook, seeking to address criticism of the social network’s privacy practices, said on Thursday that it would provide users with an expanded, downloadable archive of the many types of data on individuals that the company stores and tracks.
In a posting on its privacy blog, Facebook said that it was expanding its downloadable archive feature, called Download Your Information, to provide greater transparency on the types of data on individuals that the company stores.
The expanded archive, which Facebook said would be rolled out gradually to its 845 million monthly active users, goes beyond the first archive made available in 2010, which has drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates and regulators on the continent.
Facebook is preparing for an initial public stock sale planned for May, which is expected to value the company at $ 100 billion in the most definitive valuation of a social networking business.
Online social networks offer free services to users and make money primarily through advertising, which can often be targeted more effectively using the information the network has collected on them.
The archive Facebook published two years ago gave users a copy of their photos, posts, messages, list of friends and chat conversations. The new version, Facebook said, includes previous user names, friend requests and the Internet protocol addresses of the computers that users have logged in from. More categories of information will be made available in the future, Facebook said.
Facebook’s data collection practices have tested the boundaries of the Continent’s stringent privacy laws. The social networking site, based in Menlo Park, California, is Europe’s leading online network, according to Comscore, a research firm in Reston, Virginia.
Last December, the Irish Data Protection Commission reached an agreement with Facebook, which runs its international businesses from offices in Dublin, to provide more information to its users and amend its data protection practices. “We took up their recommendation to make more data available to Facebook users through this expanded functionality,” the company said in a statement. Facebook agreed to make those changes by July. In Europe, 40,000 Facebook users have already requested a full copy of the data that the site has compiled on each of them, straining the company’s ability to respond. Under European privacy law, the company must comply with the requests within 40 days.
Max Schrems, the German law student who filed the complaint leading to the agreement with the Irish authorities, criticised Facebook’s latest offer as insufficient.
“We welcome
that Facebook users are now getting more access to their data, but Facebook is still not in line with the European Data Protection Law,” said Mr Schrems, a student at the University of Vienna. “With the changes, Facebook will only offer access to 39 data categories, while it is holding at least 84 such data categories about every user.”
In 2011, Mr Schrems requested his own data from Facebook and received files with information in 57 categories. The disclosure, Mr Schrems said, showed that Facebook was keeping information he had previously deleted from the website, and was also storing information on his whereabouts, gleaned from his computer’s IP address. Facebook’s data collection practices are being scrutinised in Brussels as European Union policy makers deliberate on changes to the European Data Protection Directive, which was last revised in 1995. The EU commissioner responsible for the update, Viviane Reding, has cited Facebook’s data collection practices in pushing for a requirement that online businesses delete all information held on individuals at the user’s request.
Ulrich Börger, a privacy lawyer at the firm Latham & Watkins in Hamburg, said he thought it was unlikely that the European Union would ultimately enact laws that would significantly restrict the use of targeted advertising, which is at the core of the business model for websites like Facebook.
More likely, Mr Börger said, was that legislators would eventually move to require Facebook and other networking sites to revise their consent policies to make them more easy to understand. But it was unlikely that Facebook would be legally prevented from using information from individuals who sign up for the service. “I don’t see any fundamental change,” Mr Börger said in an interview. “At the end of the day, it comes back to the question of consent. They cannot go so far as to prohibit things that people are willing to consent to. That would violate an individual’s freedom to receive services they want to receive.” By arrangement with the New York Times