Privacy groups lodge official complaint against Facebook

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 18 Dec 2009 at 08:39

A coalition of privacy groups have made an official complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission about controversial changes to Facebook's privacy settings.

The complaint focuses on Facebook's decision to make more user information publicly available to search engines, such as profile photos and lists of friends. Although Facebook has actively encouraged users to revisit their privacy settings that seemingly wasn't enough to prevent private photos of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg leaking on to the web earlier this week. Zuckerberg claims he deliberately opened the photos for public consumption, although they were subsequently removed from his profile.

Based on profile data obtained from Facebook users’ friends lists, MIT researchers found that just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay

The privacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (Epic), claim that the "changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy, and contradict Facebook’s own representations".

Epic says that making more information public could have unintended consequences for Facebook users. "Based on profile data obtained from Facebook users’ friends lists, MIT researchers found that just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay," the complaint states.

It also claims that dozens of US citizens who posted messages that were critical of the Iranian Government reported that Iranian authorities had detained relatives still living in the country.

Epic has further expressed concern about the amount of data that is passed to Facebook application developers without the user's knowledge.

Facebook 'disappointed'

In a statement issued in response to the Epic complaint, Facebook says: "We've had productive discussions with dozens of organisations around the world about the recent changes, and we're disappointed that Epic has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them."

"We're pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings, and are impressed that so many have chosen to customise their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook's user empowerment and transparency efforts.

"Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link, or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalising privacy on Facebook will continue."