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)

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