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Facebook: the Law Says You Can't Have Your Data
An anonymous reader writes "After making 22 complaints regarding Facebook's various practices, the Austrian group Europe versus Facebook 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. I followed up with Facebook and learned the company insists the law places 'reasonable limits' on the data that has to be provided."
I've looked into this, and I'm fairly certain that the particular piece of information that Facebook is holding back from these (800+ page) reports is a user's biometric faceprint. Claiming that the code for those prints is Facebook's intellectual property does NOT strike me as unreasonable.
Hot off the presses yesterday
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/12/226257/facebook-your-personal-data-is-a-trade-secret
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/12/226257/facebook-your-personal-data-is-a-trade-secret
use facebook, expect data rape.
that facebook users willingly give up information that later burns them is digital-age darwinism.
If I have any sort of interaction with any company besides a pure cash transaction, somehow I'm ceding all rights to my information. I get more calls on my landline from 3rd party vendors who've purchased my profile from some company than I do from people I know. I bought a house 4 years ago and my mailbox was stuffed with targeted new homeowner fliers on the first day I opened the mailbox. I filled a prescription with an online pharmacy and now I've got people calling me trying to sell me all kinds of healthcare products. I bought one political magazine prescription (more out of pity than interest) and now I get tons of fliers and ads from special interest groups. I made a few small dollar donations ($20 range) in the last couple elections and now I have politicians from all over the country both calling and writing me for donations!
We need a privacy bill of rights. Opt-in, full disclosure, and deterrent-level fines and fees for breaking the rules.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Forget Facebook. You agree to terms of service with them. Of course no one ever reads those terms, but at least you're agreeing to a relationship with them. I don't get the credit agencies. I have no direct relationship with the credit agencies, but they collect all this data on me and it's MY responsibility to monitor and correct it if it's wrong. And if I want to check that data more than once a year, I have to pay them for MY OWN DATA.
I have recently become an Opera enthusiast. What do people think of using Opera Unite as an alternative to Facebook? You hold all your own data that way.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/12/226257/facebook-your-personal-data-is-a-trade-secret
I'd expect this being stated by one of the senior wizards at Unseen University.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Most of those things are stuff you can get for free for a lot less information. Probably the worst thing about Facebook is that they aggregate everything together. The whole is more valuable than the parts, yet they don't give you more stuff for that.
I am not paranoid. I will give out my personal data freely - if I get something valuable in exchange for it. I do it all the time with banks and dating websites.
The Irish law that forces corporations to give you the data they have on you is a great idea. I wish America had the same law.
As for exceptions for trade secrets - are they really trade secrets? Did they intentionally mix trade secrets with the data?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In a reasonable country, Facebook would be a criminal enterprise. At minimum, they have committed theft of your personal information and now claim that it is their to do with whatever this week's posted ToS says that they can.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There's a big difference between "The law says you can't have it" and "The law says we're only required to give you this much, which we've already done, so tough nuts". Facebook is saying the later (and from the summary the OP apparently understands that), while the former is the title of this story.
The issue is important enough without blatant link-baiting in the form of titles that imply government restrictions on your access to your own information. Facebook is a marketing corporation masquerading as an open social and political forum, and their privacy policy is a disaster. Isn't that enough to pillory them? Do you have to willfully misquote their statements to imply claims of censorship and government interventions?
Facebook knows everything there is to know about you.
It even knows where you put the keys you lost.
They won't tell you where your keys are- but they sure do know.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
At least in my county's (Finland) respective EU legislation there are no such provisions, that would give Facebook the right to hold my my personal data, even if it contains "trade secrets". In contrast, the law specifically notes that all my personal data must be provided to me irrespective of secrecy provisions or Non-Disclosure Agreements (only some law enforcement databases are an exemption from this– business databases definitely are not.)
If Facebook designed their database so, that it contains trade secrets embedded in my personal data, they failed to consider the law, and have caused upon themselves whatever jeopardy this could result in.
What the law says will be determined in court. A company telling the law is on their side is really not news.
Isn't Unite a cloud service like Turbo?
He's blind to decimal points.
(Deary deary me - the captcha is "otters". Well, I suppose we must do unto otters.....)
I don't really like the idea of more regulations and more potential ways to get sued, but I do like the idea of less spam so how about these steps in this direction:
-Get rid of the government Post Office. Allow free competition while enforcing property rights (delivery without consent is trespassing/littering). Depending on the interplay of new competition and the Post Office's current capacity to price services correctly maybe the price for these types of mailings goes up and they become less common.
- Perhaps part of this new competition involves mail delivery services that as a way of getting your service (you having a mail box that allows their company to put things in) they filter this junk out for you.
- Make it clear under what terms delivery services are allowed to put things in your mailbox, anything else is littering or something. I don't know if you can currently refuse large amounts of junk mail from the USPS, but if more people put this junk in a huge box and left it out and the deliverer was required to pick it back up perhaps that would cut down on this. Make refusing to similar to litter.
On the landline side, perhaps tech solutions like phones that hook into the data from Report Spam in Google Voice can help there. Or more deregulation in phone service so there are more suppliers that offer blocking spammers as a feature.
AFAIK, in Europe EU privacy directives require businesses to give you ALL information they have on you on written request. Of course, very few people every make the proper request to any company. Also, i really am not sure if Facebook runs any servers in Europe, people may be knowingly handing their information to a strictly US-based company.
In the US, Fair Credit Reporting Act requires credit bureaus to give you one free credit report a year with the information they have on you. Other companies are under no obligation to ever tell you anything. The US's privacy laws are really very lax.
What part of 'in your face' didn't everyone see coming with this fucknut company's privacy policies?
I'm sure knowledge of what I had for dinner tonight is worth $5M, at least.
Anyone know what Warren Buffett drinks? My acquisition plan involves getting him really, really, really drunk.
As if any thinking individual needed another reason ...
Facebook is for the mouth-breathing, booger-eating, minimal intelligence no-hopers. Avoid it as you would any predator.
All of you spouting TOS don't understand what's going on. It's a biometric print of a face. It doesn't have to be YOUR face.
Here is the deal... someone opens a facebook account and uploads a group photo they took at a party. YOU happen to have been at that party and ended up in the picture. This person now uploads that picture to facebook. When they do, facebook does a print of everyone in the picture INCLUDING the individuals who did not agree to the TOS. They then form a network of links to other biometric prints in other pictures. From this they devise a profile on you even though you didn't agree to their TOS, nor do you have an account.
They are now claiming this information they collected is theirs.
What makes this even more shady is the fact that the person uploading the picture may not even have the rights to the picture, nor the person who took the picture if it was taken at a private residence. In both cases, even if the picture was later required to be taken down the biometric prints are still considered by facebook to be their property.
Sorry, these practices are far from being legal.