The European Commission plans to stop Facebook from advertising users’ privacy

The European Commission plans to stop Facebook from advertising users’ privacy

Facebook is under threats of a crackdown from the European Commission on leaking and exploiting a vast amount of most personal information of its users to create bespoke advertising. The
European Commission is now planning to prevent the social network from sneaking into the users’ personal information and using it to create different advertisements.

The firm uses sophisticated software to “eavesdrop” into the users’ accounts and gathers information about their political opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs, and even their whereabouts.
After harvesting information from people’s activities on the social networking site, they make it available to advertisers, which is an illegal act.

Following the EC concerns over the privacy infiltration, the new EC Directive, which will be introduced in January, will put a ban on such advertising unless the concerned users allow
it. Facebook will face legal charges or a massive fine, if it denies or fails to comply with this new legislation. The legal action will do a huge damage to Facebook’s plans to float on the Wall Street stock exchange next year.

Vice president of European Commission, Viviane Reding, told that the Directive would amend current protection laws of European data and will make sure the consistency in how offending
firms are dealt with across the EU.

Speaking to the local media, Reding said, “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.”

The vice president added, “Consumers in Europe should see their data strongly protected, regardless of the EU country they live in and regardless of the country in which companies which
process their personal data are established.”

Facebook keeps messages and “chats” sent via the site stored in its database even after they are deleted. The information analysed and stored by the company is not limited to users’ personal
details, the “likes” and “dislikes” that they input on their walls are also recorded.

Details about the friend list, family and educational background is also stored, while other commercially valuable information, like the music people are listening to via the site, is
also available to advertisers. Not only that, whatever people share on Facebook is also tracked, retained, and used for commercial purposes.

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on Nov 29 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry