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24-Year-Old Asks Facebook For His Data, Gets 1,200 PDFs
chicksdaddy writes "Be careful of what you ask for. That's a lesson Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria learned the hard way when he sent a formal request to Facebook for a copy of every piece of personal information that the social network had collected on him, as required under European law. After a wait, the 24-year-old law student got what he was seeking: a CD with all his data stored on it — 1,222 files in all. The collection of PDFs was roughly the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, but told a more mundane story: a record of Schrems' years-long relationship with the world's largest social network, including reams of data he had deleted. Now Schrems is pushing Facebook to disclose even more of what it knows."
Yeah, after the first few sentences I was expecting he received several boxes of printed out code. Oh, he got one CD? That sounds...anticlimactic.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Indeed. In europe and canada an individual has final say on their personal information. And if it's deleted the company must delete any backup or cached data relating to that person too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Moderating a Funny post Informative, that should be illegal.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I was trying to avoid some typing with the DOD reference, but that obviously didn't work, so let's try a couple of examples. The basic point is that easy-to-access and easy-to-delete are not same thing; data is just too easy to copy.
Example 1: I send you an email with a pdf attachment. You read it, and then we decide to delete all copies of the pdf. Where do we need to look?
Example 2 (a bit more like the system we're talking about):
How do we know which servers to notify for deletion? Do we maintain a list somewhere? Do we tell all of our servers to delete it? What about backups? What do we do if the server is not available when we send the notification?
It is not easy ...
The data usage policy is illegal under EU and most other european law ... so?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I think I agree with you. I never understood why people complain about what sites do when all of what they do is in the terms.
From what I can tell, pretty much everything there is to know about how your data is used by Facebook is on:
http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
http://www.facebook.com/full_data_use_policy
http://developers.facebook.com/policy/
http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php
All that comes in at about 15000 words. Sure, this will probably take you more than a few minutes to read and understand, unless you are Lt. Cmdr. Data. But if it is so important to you, than why not spend the time?
I have an feeling that people are either too lazy for their own good, or just like to see injustice where there is none because they like the feeling of righteous indignation
Sorry, I don't usually rant; please, anyone, do not take this post as impugning you personally; and I am probably missing many good counter-points.
Because a user shouldn't have to read 15,000 word legal documents to understand what could be written in layman's terms in a point form spanning just a few pages.
In addition to full legal documentation, there should be a brief summary in point form for the average user to get a basic understanding of what's what. If he then wishes, he can gain more information from the legalese docs, or otherwise agree.