Groups Allege New Facebook Policy Violates Federal Privacy Law
Ten privacy and consumer groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), announced earlier this month that they have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleging that Facebook’s privacy-policy changes violate federal law.
The social networking website has informed its users that it will be arming them with better control of privacy settings, but also will now provide default settings that could allow anyone on the internet to see their personal information. EPIC argues that this violates Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices.
Most observers say Facebook is making the move for two main reasons: to grow overall traffic and compete with the micro-blogging service Twitter, and to sell more detailed information to third-party developers and — perhaps — to marketers.
But EPIC and the other groups, which include the American Library Association, the Center for Digital Democracy and the U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation, say the new policy goes too far.
The change in privacy settings means that Facebook will now treat more categories of data as “publicly available information.” Previously, only a user’s name and a user’s network were, by default, publicly available. Under the new policy, that category will now also include profile photos, friend lists, gender, pages the user is a fan of and geographic regions. The default setting will now disclose all of that information to search engines, to internet users whether or not they use Facebook, and others. EPIC notes that users previously had a one-click option to prevent the disclosure of personal information to third party application developers, but that option no longer exists under the revised privacy settings.
“This is the most significant case now before the Federal Trade Commission,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg said in a statement. “More than 100 million people in the United States subscribe to the Facebook service. The company should not be allowed to turn down the privacy dial on so many American consumers.”
For its part, Facebook says the new policy is one of “personalizing privacy” for its users. The company also charges that EPIC refused to talk with the company as it developed the policy.
“We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them,” Facebook said in a statement. “We’re pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook’s user empowerment and transparency efforts.”
This dustup here in the States comes on the heels of Facebook’s decision this summer to substantially revamp its policies regarding the use of members’ information, after Canadian privacy regulators pressured the company to clamp down on “over-sharing” of personal data.
The changes were notable because Facebook said that it would apply them to all of its users, even though it could have just applied them to Canadians. That move was thought to be taken to fend off regulators in European countries, which have stricter privacy laws than Canada.
As I pointed out at the time, social networking sites need to be as clear as possible about their privacy policies and they should refrain from trying to walk too close to the line separating what is permissible from what is not.
On the surface, it appears that Facebook is being out front about its privacy changes in this case, but EPIC disagrees.
It says that Facebook’s new privacy policy “misleads users into believing that their information is safe,” and that the company’s “assertion that the revisions to the privacy policy will actually enhance user privacy is outright deception.”
It will be interesting to see what the FTC decides to do in this case; in the meantime, Valleywag has created a handy “guide to re-privatizing your profile” for Facebook users.
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Jacqueline Klosek, Senior Counsel in the Business Law Department of Goodwin Procter LLP, is a frequent author and commentator on data privacy and security. You can email her at jacquelineklosek@gmail.com -
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