Facebook might be facing a legal action as it seems to not be complying with EU privacy laws according to the office of the Hamburg Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information.
The law prescribe that a company has to ask a user if they want their information stored or not, and then they are not allowed to store it if the person says no. Facebook does not search for approval, but goes ahead and stores the information.
Facebook’s defence is that users are allowed to change their settings to opt-out. However, Facebook state that “During our contentious dialogue with our supervisory authority in Europe, the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, we agreed to develop a best practice solution to notify people on Facebook about photo tag suggest.” Therefore, Facebook is currently working with the Office of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to create a way to properly alert users to Facebook’s features and gaining their approval.
What is your opinion : Shall Facebook be oblige to ask for the prior approval of its users or a posterior notification shall be sufficient ?
This has been a long standing argument with many features launched by Facebook. As many of the features are directly related to privacy features, the argument becomes even more personalized for its various users. My personal view on this topic is that there should be a prior notification and agreement sought for not only the tagging feature but any feature in general, as features essentially alter the initial platform that people subscribe to.
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree with that Prasad, but to be honest, I'm one of the many Facebook users that never reads the small print and agrees to pretty much anything.. so how do I know that I haven't given away my rights already to Facebook in this or many other related matters?
ReplyDeleteFor me the question is not whether they should ask (they should always do) but how to ask it.
What I would suggest would be to always seek for the users' acknowledgement through simple/1-2 lines questions instead of trying to trick us by asking for our consent through a document as long as an encyclopedia that no one would care to read.