San Francisco — In a stunning move against the popular social networking firm; The European Commission is planning to restrict the way the popular social media networking behemoth “eavesdrops” on its users to gather vast amounts of information about their political opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs — and even their whereabouts, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
According to The Sunday Telegraph, reports that the European Commission, as part of its restructuring to the upcoming Data Protection Directive, which would prevent Facebook continuing how it practices data sharing with advertisers.
In order to gain more advertising dollars, Facebook allegedly utilizes state-of-the-art software, to harvests information from people’s activities on the social networking site — irrespective of their individual privacy settings — and make it available to advertisers, it claimed.
However, following concerns over the privacy implications of the procedure, Facebook may have to rework the way it uses personal user information to sell to advertisers, as a new European Commission legislation will soon be introduced in Europe’s lower house in January, which will ban such advertising unless users specifically allow it, the newspaper said.
The broadsheet newspaper states that an investigation it undertook highlights the extent to which Facebook gathers far more information than simply what links or pages you click to “Like” — including some that relates to individuals’ political opinions, sexuality, and religious beliefs — that can “help companies to focus adverts according to the profiles of users”, including data not limited to personal information.
But Viviane Reding, the vice-president of European Commission, mentioned that the directive would amend current European data protection laws in the light of technological advances and ensure consistency so that firms that do not follow regulations could face legal actions or fines across the EU.
However, the Telegraph further quoted Reding as saying: “I call on service providers — especially social media sites — to be more transparent about how they operate. Users must know what data is collected and further processed [and] for what purposes.”
Source: (Facebook)
“Consumers in Europe should see their data strongly protected, irrespective of the EU country they reside in and regardless of the country in which companies which process their personal data are established,” she added.
Facebook has, however, refuted the claims.
A spokesman for the company said: “We do not distribute people’s names with an advertiser without a person’s explicit authorization and we never sell personal information to third parties.”
According to the Sunday Telegraph, which states that, despite the fact that most of the data it accumulates is stored in U.S. based datacenters, however, if the social media networking giant fails to comply with the new legislation it may face legal action.
Also, the newspaper reported that Facebook has amassed a wealth of data relating to searches, political beliefs, sexual preferences and other data that “can be used”, but not necessarily will, for commercial purposes. Along with this, chat messages and other complex information of what users share, as well as content seemingly ‘deleted’ by the user, remains as part of Facebook’s wealth of retained information, seemingly confirmed by 24-year-old Austrian student Max Schrems’ claims.
The move comes following an inquest that highlighted the extent to which Facebook helps companies to focus adverts according to the profiles of users.
In addition, earlier this year, to add more concern to Facebook’s ‘hidden’ data collection practices, the social network’s search algorithm was exposed, illustrating how Facebook picks out the ‘most relevant’ search results based on Facebook friend profile visits. Also, the information analyzed and stored by the company is not limited to users’ personal details, and ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’ that they input on their “walls”.
The social media outfit also culls details about their friends, family and educational background and detects subtle changes to their lifestyle, the paper said. It is not altogether evident why the social network preserves this data, if it apparently has no commercial use for it as of yet.
However, as the Irish data protection agency continues to investigate Facebook’s operational procedures, especially to see whether the social networking giant violates either Irish or European data protection laws, there is conflicting evidence to determine exactly what data Facebook collects, the activities it records, and for how long this data is retained for.