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Facebook Holding Back Personal Data
itwbennett writes "Facebook has reduced the amount of personal data it releases to users as required by European Union law. Due to the volume of requests since Europe v. Facebook began its campaign, Facebook is no longer sending CDs to people. Facebook said in a statement that the CD mailout 'contains a level of detail that is less useful for the average user — it is a much rawer collection of data.' Instead, users are now directed to a page where they can download their personal 'archive,' which according to Facebook is a copy of 'all of the personal information you've shared on Facebook.' But rather than the 57 categories of data early data requesters received, the new tool downloads just 22 categories."
The fact that Facebook sends CD's to people never even knew. Is this a euro thing only?
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What did people THINK was going to happen when they signed up for Facebook and effectively dropped trou to the universe?
And expecting the grubby little data miners to play fair with people who they're making money off of?
Pfft! Yeah. What world are YOU from?
There's one solution to the problem of Facebook belching your data to whoever pays them their pound of flesh.
DON'T FUCKING SIGN UP FOR FACEBOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
What did people THINK was going to happen when they signed up for Facebook and effectively dropped trou to the universe?
And expecting the grubby little data miners to play fair with people who they're making money off of?
Pfft! Yeah. What world are YOU from?
There's one solution to the problem of Facebook belching your data to whoever pays them their pound of flesh.
DON'T FUCKING SIGN UP FOR FACEBOOK IN THE FIRST PLACE!
With most people, that kind of obvious realization breaks down the moment having some control over their own life involves denying oneself a convenience that is dangled in front of them like bait. The form of the convenience could be the service itself that Facebook offers. It could be (for most anyway) failure to bear the always rewarding but sometimes heavy burden of being a real individual, such as having to explain to friends that you have good reason not to use the site even if they would prefer to contact you with it. Of course a real friend would understand and respect that and not demand (by acting hurt, annoyed, etc) that you conform to their example for something so optional, but judging from the way most people talk about bandwagon appeals and peer pressure it seems most people think this kind of manipulation is normal and legitimate.
It's the same reason most boycotts don't get off the ground. The moment people would have to make do without a luxury or prepare something themselves instead of having it pre-packaged or some other test of their commitment to principle, they cave. It doesn't matter what the company has done to make itself unworthy of continued patronage. It's most unfortunate but the masses of people are pushovers who won't take a stand for much of anything unless they feel (correctly or not) that their back is against a wall.
I suppose most of you reading this think it's a good thing that government intervenes to regulate Facebook. If this were food safety or building construction or some other thing that is a matter of life-and-death, where great damage could be done before any reason for a user/customer to suspect a problem has manifested, then I would agree with you. As it stands now with Facebook, I say that the moment you interfere with this process and shelter this kind of spinelessness is the moment you prevent the character growth of those who are badly in need of a lesson. I know it looks like a nice thing to do but that's short-term thinking; in the long run it makes the problem worse.
Those who have a clue, care about privacy, and make their own decisions avoided Facebook from the beginning. The rest are making their beds and should not be prevented from laying in them.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Or, you know, just give them inconsequential minutiae.
Any communication I have on there is pretty much worthless anyway, because I don't put anything important or private on facebook.
It is possible to use it without posting pictures of that time you were passed out, naked and drunk, in the fountain in the town square...
You are ignoring the fact that others can tag and post about you. You do not control the actions of all of your Facebook friends.
It seems probable that most users underestimate what information Facebook is collecting about them.
http://lifehacker.com/5843969/facebook-is-tracking-your-every-move-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-it
Bullshit. At a given moment in time, with rules A I give facebook permission to collect that data. Then they change the rules and now I want to see for myself they are working within the law... If facebook has a problem with that, Facebook shouldn't be 'servicing' under our laws... simple as that. It's facebook that is being bad, not the client that has every right to know what is being kept from them is asking for that information. Facebook has a choice not to be in EU market you know. They have to keep to our laws. It's not the responsibilty of the user.
I am more concerned about the information they have about me that I did not give me. A friend of mine recently registered a new user and the first thing Facebook asks is if she knew these people. A list of friends and family of her. How did Facebook get this information?
You can press the "Many More" button - setting up a script to get all of them is trivial with greasemonkey, and even more trivial if you spend a bit of time clicking. There doesn't appear to be another way of getting at posts, but all of them seem available, and all of them are easy to get at. I suppose you could also deconstruct whatever call is pulling the posts and try to get them all in one go.
So, ALL current government actions are bad?
No, just the ones OUR government have elected to take, in recent memory. Admittedly, there might be an anomaly hidden in the noise, but I'm pretty sure that if it's not a blatant power/money grab, then we can count on it to be a total clusterfuck (often turning into a power/money grab, a la the healthcare bill).
There is a lot more info they have about you, that you didn't give them voluntarily.
Facebook cookies track your movements on third-party web sites. Until recently logging off from Facebook did not help (reported extensively on /. over the last months).
Facebook tries to recognise and automatically tag people in other people's photos: you're in your friend's photo, are tagged automatically or by that friend, and another bit of information about you becomes available to Facebook and it's out of your control.
You may be mentioned (tagged) in a friend's comment. Again you didn't volunteer that information about you to Facebook, someone else does, and you don't have control about it.
You can not delete comments or photos. Many people think they can as there is a "delete" function, but all it does is hide this information from you and other users. It's not gone as in deleted, it's merely hidden, and is still there.
You can not close and delete your account. You can't even close it afaik.
All this info on Facebook is there forever, out of your control. And the last part is maybe the most damning of all. There is no control over your own data on Facebook. They pretend to give you some (by allowing "delete") but in reality they don't (it's not deleted). They collect info about you that is not given by you, instead it's collected automatically and is info that is about things you do outside of Facebook. Those things should worry people. It is not about the info you put in your profile, it's not about what you write yourself in your comments or the photos you post yourself, not even about the external links in friend's messages that you click. It's the rest of the information that's gathered in the background, unknown to you, out of your control.
Or, go to your account options, go to the Discussions "tab" and for "Retrieve [ ] Messages" option select "Many" then it will retrieve all of them providing you are logged in.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Irrelevant.
Here in the EU, you're the owner of your data. You have the right to request from any company that has personally identifiable data on you for any reason, to request it to be corrected, or to request it to be deleted.
There are also limits on how the information can be used.
Compliance with this isn't optional. There are big sanctions for not complying with the requirements, which go as high half a million Euro for the "very grave" category in some countries. And since at least where I am, the agency is self-financed, they're quite keen on collecting those.
Don't like it? Don't do business in the EU.
For people of a certain age, virtually all of their friends use Facebook as a primary means of communication. In other words, not using Facebook means social isolation. That's not a particularly worthwhile tradeoff, nor is it even a guarantee of privacy. You don't need an account on Facebook for people to post things about you. I have friends who post tons of photos of their young children and the funny things their children say.
In other words, let's say that you don't have a FB account, yet somehow still manage to find out about a party. Is it still possible for FB to learn of your attendance at said party and your amusing (yet seemingly private) actions at said party? Yes, because anybody at the party can post a photo of you at the party to FB and put your name on it.
dom
Not having a Facebook account interferes with interstate commerce by preventing advertisers from accessing data about your personal life. It is now mandated that all US citizens have a Facebook account and post regularly on it.
The above might be assumed to be an absurdity, but the logic behind it is an argument the DoJ is currently arguing before the Supreme Court. Congress already has had the authority to prevent personal use and consumption upheld. They can fine farmers for producing any crop for personal use. The first controlling case regarding that interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause was not even drug-related; it was about growing wheat for personal consumption (Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942)). Soon, they'll be able to fine people for failure to purchase a product. With current case law, there will be no limit to that power, even if the use of it is currently voluntarily limited to the single issue at hand. It will be expanded.
They deduce it. Similar names, similar locations, similar employment workplaces and similar school history. This provides possible links to several people in their database, and when several of those people have a network of interrelations, they can just ask if you know the most probable ones. As soon as she answers 'yes' or 'no' then facebook know stuff about her that is not deduction, but they can deduce more..
"All at the expense of some tracking information that can't really tell you anything about your own browsing habits than you already know, it's not like they're compelled to give their analysis of that data, simply what pages you refreshed when. If they correlate that to find you tend to search for ponography featuring chubby women after visiting your cousin's profile, that's their information, not yours."
Sorry, but you're completely wrong on that as far as the EU is concerned. The legal definition of personal information is quite clear. "Information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person".
That's one of the key aspects of EU Data Protection law. It is precisely the act of "correlation" that the law is intended to control.
What about their friends and their friends of friends and assorted hanger-ons? There are some things damage control can't cover. If I'm gonna be caught with a small mountain of blow and and a dead transvestite named Chastity in my bed, then I'd rather it all stay small-town and not get plastered all over the world. Just to be clear - that has absolutely never happened to me. Her name was Lucy.
Totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter where the data came from, or how it was collected. If you hold personal data on a person, you are legally required to provide it to that person on request. All of it. There's no exception for data that the person gave you willingly, there's no exception for data that's "less useful for the average user", and there's no exception for "data that would reveal our trade secrets", which is the excuse Facebook used for withholding some data the last time.
This is nothing to do with making data more useful for the average user, it's about cutting costs, and breaking both the spirit and the letter of EU law as much as possible while attempting to look helpful and hoping that nobody notices.
We cannot tell anything without seeing sample data. The 22 categories might be fine and compliant with the law. It seems to me that a lot of the data in the 57 categories was over and above personal data as defined in the data protection act. What's the point of giving encrypted passwords for example!
I'm not using facebook, I have no account, but still they're collecting data about me.
In other words, not using Facebook means social isolation
Oh shit, you mean standing up for your ideals might involve some mild inconvenience? Well fuck that!
That's not a particularly worthwhile tradeoff
But if three or four of you do it then your other friends will not be able to rely on Facebook for communication within the group. So they'll start using other mechanisms, and eventually Facebook just fades into the background as 'that thing I can use for communicating with a few of my friends' and their usage starts to drop too and Facebook becomes a passing fad, rather than a dominant communication mechanism. Or you can just say 'well everyone else is doing it' (which, after all, was such a good excuse every other time it was used) and sign up.
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Or get better friends...
If your friends do not respect you enough to respect your privacy, then they are not your friends. They are people using you for their own entertainment and you need to wake up and stand up for yourself.
If you know your friends are going to be disrespectful and post stupid pictures of you on Facebook and this bothers you, don't do the stupid things you don't want appearing on Facebook in front of them. How is it different from your friends running around telling everyone that you are an idiot? They could take that photo and publish it in a newspaper without the help of Facebook. Because they can reach more people faster? Because it is archived forever? The high school yearbook is also forever. People's memories are also forever. The idea that you would want to turn back time and remove all evidence of an activity just because it is now inconvenient is ludicrous. It happened. You did it. Now you have to live with it. You may regret it, but you cannot turn back time. You cannot undo the past. Take responsibility for your actions and conduct your way in a manner that your mother would be proud of. All the time. And when you screw up, accept responsibility and deal with the consequences like an adult.