http://epic.org/2010/05/new-facebook-privacy-complaint.html
New Facebook Privacy Complaint Filed with Trade Commission
Today, EPIC and 14 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that Facebook has engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices in violation of consumer protection law.
TrackBack URL for this entry:http://privacy.org/cgibin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/939
http://epic.org/privacy/facebook/
What’s the difference between Facebook’s revised privacy settings and the old ones?
Under the revised privacy policy, Facebook now treats the following categories of personal data as “publicly available
information:”
• users’ names,• profile photos,• lists of friends,• pages they are fans of,
• gender,• geographic regions, and• networks to which they belong.
By default, Facebook discloses “publicly available information” to search engines, to Internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. According to Facebook, such information can be accessed by “every application and website, including those you have not connected with . . . .”
I thought that Facebook’s had a privacy policy… why doesn’t this protect users?
Facebook’s privacy policy doesn’t actually protect users, it misleads users into believing that their information is safe, while the site actually discloses information to third-party application developers and the public. Facebooks’ revised privacy policy mandates the sharing of large amounts of personal information, whether or not users what to share that information.
What’s so bad about friends lists being deemed “publicly available information?”
Dozens of American Facebook users, who posted political messages critical of Iran, have reported that Iranian authorities subsequently questioned and detained their relatives. According to the Wall Street Journal, one Iranian-American graduate student received a threatening email that read, “we know your home address in Los Angeles,” and directed the user to “stop spreading lies about Iran on Facebook.” Another U.S. Facebook user who criticized Iran on Facebook stated that security agents in Tehran located and arrested his father as a result of the postings. One Facebook user who traveled to Iran said that security officials asked him whether he owned a Facebook account, and to verify his answer, they performed a Google search for his name, which revealed his Facebook page. His passport was subsequently confiscated for one month, pending interrogation.
