Facebook: Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

An anonymous reader writes "An Austrian group called Europe versus Facebook has so far made 22 complaints regarding the social network's practices. In the process, the organization has stumbled upon an important tidbit: Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data if it deems doing so would adversely affect its trade secrets or intellectual property."

Comments

Shock Horror

[Cryacin]

Of course they'll tell you that. In fact, haven't you realised? You ARE their intellectual property. All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers. Go on, put your private life on teh intertubes for all to see. Check in with FourSquare to become the mayor of burger king to get a 10% discount on your next piece of crap for lunch, and watch your insurance company make a silent note. Write on your wall about your cool new Nike Football shoes, and watch targeted advertising appear to you for other football related products.

The herd is a goldmine, ripe for the picking.

Re:Shock Horror

[Daniel Dvorkin]

All you iSheep, Twits and FacePalmers.

He says, on a public web forum.

Re:Shock Horror

[betterunixthanunix]

Indeed, although there is not much personal information on Slashdot. The problem is not that people have public lives, it is that Facebook greatly expands the scope of what is "public" while greatly diminishing the scope of what is "private." The information Facebook collects is much broader in scope than Slashdot, and extends beyond what people actively post on Facebook.

There is also the matter that supposedly private messages on Facebook are not really private at all, a classic case of the "third party server" problem. Unlike email, for which there are well-developed (but rarely used) methods of keeping private messages private, Facebook is designed to thwart such efforts (e.g. to encrypt an email, I can just hit a checkbox, assuming keys have been set up; to encrypt a Facebook message, I have to manually invoke a cryptosystem, copy and paste, and so forth -- a pain even for technically competent users). For most people, the "privacy" issue on Facebook is related to what their friends, coworkers, and potential future contacts can see -- very few people give any thought to the amount of information that Facebook itself has, and for many Facebook has become the primary means of communication.

Interesting

[iluvcapra]

So you, by definition, have knowledge of all of you personal information (otherwise it wouldn't be personal), they must think that they have a way of turning knowledge about your self that is available to you consciously, into information that isn't, for example by analyzing your web history, or use of language, or friends, in order to predict certain cultural preferences, or ad susceptibility. That's perfectly believable, and no, you probably aren't entitled to it. If you don't want them building models of you, don't submit your information.

Re:Interesting

[iluvcapra]

It might even be more fun than that. Maybe they know things about you that you never told them, like your gender or age. I would also tend to believe that if they're able to figure out this information about people they're probably entitled to keep the fact of their knowing secret.

Re:Interesting

[PopeRatzo]

. A coworker today was wondering why Facebook recommended as a friend a person that we recognise the name of from within our company, but in an overseas branch.

I've got a better one: A colleague who has a facebook account but has never posted anything, not a photo, not even information in the profile got a recommendation from Facebook to add as a friend someone who is in her cancer survivor's group. The absolutely only bit of information about her that she's been able to find on Facebook is a photograph from a different friend's profile in which she appears but is not named in the photo's info. As I said, she has never posted anything about herself and the person who was recommended to her is not the facebook friend of a facebook friend.

Wrap your head around that one. Now maybe there's some bit of data she forgot about or some connection she has been unable to learn, but she's really a detail-oriented person and has just not been able to determine how this connection was made.

Either way, it's creepy as hell and she deleted her account, although she has no misconceptions that anything collected about her has been deleted. I guess you would say she "closed" her account because it does not appear that Facebook ever willingly relents a scrap of info.

My suggestion? Back out slowly, don't try to delete your account. Change your name, get facial reconstruction and move far away.

I never really liked it much, but I just won't touch that shit any more. I hate to sound like an eccentric old crank but I've been writing letters a lot more lately. I don't even let my eyes linger on the Facebook icon on any webpages I read.

Remember...

[LqdSlpStrm]

If it is free, you are not the client. You are the product, and you are being sold.

Re:Remember...

[subreality]

I'll drop the meme when they stop treating me like a product.