Consumerist
Facebook is being investigated by the U.K.'s Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) over their jacked-up cancellation policies, which keeps your user data on Facebook's servers even after you've closed your account. Facebook says its privacy policies are well within ICO regulations, and that they are taking the "concerns of the ICO and our user's privacy very seriously."
Although Facebook doesn't delete your data when you cancel an account with them, they point out that you can go through and manually delete all personal information item by item. ICO says that's not good enough:
The ICO feels that organizations should only hold information as long as necessary and will be looking at Facebook's privacy policy, the rights to data the company asserts and the privacy implications of applications embedded in Facebook.The clarity of information users receive on signing up with social-networking sites is also one of the central concerns of the ICO.
"We'll be working with the site to achieve better quality information for users to make it absolutely clear to people what exactly will happen to their information once it's posted," said Evans.
"Facebook Faces UK Privacy Probe" [PCWorld]
(Photo: Getty)
Comments
Snazzy pic. Facebook took a dump on the world when it became open to everyone and then introduced the apps. I only went to college so I could get my very own facebook, only to be mocked by the five hundred million Hannah Montana clones that have joined since I did. Pedophiles: 2 College Kids: 0
most facebook apps are so annoying. everytime i log on, i have 8 notificatinos for 'which disney character are you' or 'what color should your eyes be?'.
some of them are pretty cool, like horoscopes or vampires, but most of them make me want to shoot my computer.
I had a feeling they kept information on file. I deleted my account recently, but when you delete an account, facebook emails you to inform you that whenever you want to revive your account you can enter your old log-in information and they will send you a confirmation email. And despite having requested to not be sent notices about people writing on my "wall." I did receive one after activation. I'm wondering if there is any way to deal with this other than reactivating my account and deleting everything?
any ideas?
@Lin-Z: When I deleted mine, there was a box to check on the page to not recieve notifications when people wrote on my wall, sent me messages, and so on...
Then again, a couple months later, I decided to reactivate my account. And I'm glad that they had kept my information on file.
I didn't add anything to my profile that I wouldn't want future employers to see, so it didn't bother me...I had nothing to hide on it.
If a person deletes their Facebook account, that means they're saying "I don't want my information on this website anymore." Which should mean ALL information, not just the stuff you failed to manually delete one-by-one right before the deletion. It's not a question of "I don't want anyone to see it," it's a question of "I want my information off of this website because I won't be here to monitor it."
Because I've never heard of anyone complain about annoying apps: I HATE almost all of them. The point of most of them is not to facilitate sharing but to create SICK amounts of spam. If the app only asks you to invite friends once, it's probably ok.
My favorites:
-Goodreads' FB app, which allows you to import books from your GR account
-the birthday exporter, which lets you export SELECTED birthdays to Google or any iCal app
-what cities I've been to, simply because I like to brag about the few places I've been
well with sherlock holmes on the case, there's nothing to worry about
Facebook just doesn't get it. This is one more example of their abusive disregard of privacy concerns.
My friend accidentally deleted her account (something involving somehow signing up her email address twice, thus deleting her original account) - she couldn't log on or anything like that. This would not be as huge a deal, except in her photo albums were probably 100 pictures that had gotten lost when her hard drive crashed, meaning she only had them on Facebook.
She emailed the customer support explaining the situation, and within a day had her account back up with all the old information and the problem with the email address fixed.
In this situation, it was very good to have that information backed up, otherwise an entire semester of college and a trip to Hawaii's photos probably would have been lost.
(And obviously, yes she has since downloaded all the images and backed them up to an external - but at the time, she was quite upset to possibly lose all those memories.)
I learned how to block application invites. It's great. First you have to remove any applications you have that were not created by Facebook. Then go to privacy, Edit Settings for applications, the Other Applications tab, and finally select "Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API" and press Save.
Now your name won't be available when people invite friends to an application.
To take it one step further, there are several Greasemonky scripts that hide all 3rd party or selected applications from view. The only thing that could be better is that they take half a second to work after the page loads.
At least FaceBook has *some* privacy controls. I recently went through this same problem with GetSatisfaction.com, which has the same "jacked-up cancellation policy" - your info stays on the site forever, regardless of whether you cancel your membership.
Facebook will be forgotten 5 yrs from now.
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