BRUSSELS: Belgium’s commissioned for privacy reported on Facebook Inc.’s revised policies and terms-of-use concluded that they give users a false sense of control over their data privacy, and that the Silicon Valley social-network company is acting in violation of European privacy law.
Commissioned by the Belgian Data Protection Authority and published Monday, the report from academics at the Catholic University of Leuven and the Free University of Brussels, will be used by the Belgian Privacy Commission in an investigation it launched last month into Facebook. However, the report doesn’t purport to be the view of the commission, and the commission has no sanctioning powers. If it believes there is a case to pursue, it will send the dossier to the Belgian prosecutor’s office, which would decide to go ahead with the case or not.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company recently updated its terms and policies to make them more clear and concise, to reflect new product features, and to highlight how the company was expanding people’s control over advertising.
The spokesperson said Facebook was confident the updates comply with applicable laws.
“As a company with international headquarters in Dublin, we routinely review product and policy updates, including this one, with our regulator, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, who oversees our compliance with the EU Data Protection Directive as implemented under Irish law.”
Several European countries are in talks with Facebook over their concerns that the company’s privacy settings and terms-of-service don’t meet European data-protection standards, a person familiar with the matter said. European officials say they hope to complete legislation over new EU-wide data protection rules by the end of this year. The rules are expected to focus on strict data-protection measures for European consumers.
Monday’s report picked apart Facebook’s privacy settings and terms and conditions, which went into effect Jan. 31, but were announced earlier.
“Facebook’s revised Data Use Policy is an extension of existing practices. This nevertheless raises concerns because Facebook’s data processing capabilities have increased both horizontally and vertically,” the report said. “Both are leveraged to create a vast advertising network which uses data from inside and outside Facebook to target both users and non-users of Facebook.”
The commission sent out a series of questions about Facebook’s new policies last month to the U.S. company, and received those answers Monday, said a spokeswoman for the commission. But the answers were highly technical and the commission will demand further clarification, the spokeswoman said.
The commission’s main concerns were about software additions to browsers, called plug-ins, advertising and the sharing of photos through WhatsApp and Instagram, companies that Facebook now owns, the spokeswoman said.
The report said Facebook places too much burden on users to navigate a complex web of settings, including for privacy, apps, advertisements and followers. Facebook’s default settings related to behavioural profiling or social ads, for example, are particularly problematic, it said. Opt-outs for sponsored stories or collection of location data aren’t provided, it said.
It said Facebook’s ability to track users’ activity outside Facebook have increased exponentially as time has passed, mainly through the spread of social-plug-in–“Like” buttons–and through new forms of mobile tracking. It said Facebook now gathers information through these plug-in regardless of whether the buttons are used.
It said Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp has allowed Facebook to collect more kinds of user data, which enables more detailed profiling.
The report also said that it is impossible to add information on Facebook that may not later be used for targeting advertisements.
“Any ‘like’ may become a trigger to portray a user in a ‘Sponsored Story’ or Social Ad. From the latter one can opt-out, but the only way to stop appearing in Sponsored Stories, is by stopping to ‘like’ content altogether. Users are even more disempowered because they are unaware about how exactly their data is used for advertising purposes,” the report said.
It said that Facebook’s terms don’t properly acknowledge the data subject rights of users. “For example, deleting one’s profile is an ‘all-or-nothing’ exercise and only relates to things you have posted, such as your photos and status updates.” Though users have some options to control the visibility of their information within their networks, they are not able to prevent Facebook from further using this information for its purposes,” the report said.
