The European Commission in January is going to make it harder for social networking company Facebook to share a users personal information with advertisers unless they opt-in to that type of sharing.
According to The Telegraph officials are preparing to update already in existence data protection laws, making it harder for Facebook to give away for example a users location based information and political beliefs.
Speaking about their new system of checks and balances Viviane Reding, the vice president of European Commission says:
“I call on service providers – especially social media sites – to be more transparent about how they operate,” and “Users must know what data is collected and further processed [and] for what purposes.”
Facebook in the meantime has argued that all data they collect is shared anonymously with advertisers through an aggregated system, hiding personal details from potential information buyers while still providing them with useful information that provides relevant ads to site visitors.
Facebook has become a regular target of the European Union, in June 2009 the countries top officials created privacy guidelines for social networking and in June 2011 Facebook’s facial recognition software was placed under investigation.
With more than 800 million users worldwide it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Facebook has come under greater scrutiny as more than 10% of the world’s population now logs onto Mark Zuckerberg’s website.
Do you think better regulations are needed to keep Facebook’s privacy policy in check or should understanding what is being given up to advertisers be the responsibility of users who have access to the company’s ever changing privacy policy?
