Facebook agrees to tighten privacy security

Facebook agrees to tighten privacy security

Facebook has agreed with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to tighten its privacy security and delete unnecessary data.  The social networking site came to this decision following
an investigation by Irish regulators.

The social network, with more than 800 million users, keeps user data and all operations in Ireland. A few days ago, the Irish Data Protection regulators performed a full audit of Facebook’s
systems and suggested to tighten the privacy security.

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, said the social network has agreed to their suggestions and have decided to make more than a dozen privacy improvements within next
six months.

There were claims that the social network is creating shadow profiles of some people who actually do not exist. Many opposed the way Facebook used to treat the personal data of the subscribers.
All these controversies led to the investigation that was launched in October.

As a result of the investigation, the Irish regulators found that while collecting personal data about non-users for security purposes, Facebook does not use it commercially or to create
shadow profiles.

The report from Irish regulators stated, “While certain data which could be used to build what we have seen termed as a ‘shadow profile’ of a non-user was received by Facebook, no actual
use of this nature was made of such data.”

Facebook’s director of public policy in Europe, Lord Richard Allan, welcomed the findings and said, “They’ve found that the way we’re using data is consistent with how we say we’ll use
data… the issues raised were not based on substance.”

He added, “For people who are not users of Facebook or who are not currently logged in the browser cookie we collect, which is an important security cookie, will be deleted after 10 days.”

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s report suggested that Facebook should have handled the implementation of this feature in a more appropriate manner and they recommended taking
additional steps from a best practice perspective to ensure the consent collected from users for this feature can be relied upon.

Facebook, thus, agreed to provide users with more notifications about facial recognition to give them the opportunity to opt out, as part of changes that will mean more privacy alerts
across the website.

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Dec 30 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry