Discovering What Facebook Knows About You
Things are getting interesting in Europe:
Max is a 24 year old law student from Vienna with a flair for the interview and plenty of smarts about both technology and legal issues. In Europe there is a requirement that entities with data about individuals make it available to them if they request it. That’s how Max ended up with a personalized CD from Facebook that he printed out on a stack of paper more than a thousand pages thick (see image below). Analysing it, he came to the conclusion that Facebook is engineered to break many of the requirements of European data protection. …
The logical next step was a series of 22 lucid and well-reasoned complaints that he submitted to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (Facebook states that European users have a relationship with the Irish Facebook subsidiary).
EDITED TO ADD (11/14): The 22 complaints are here
Paul Renault • October 18, 2011 6:51 AM
In the past few weeks, there seemed to be a a discrete ramping up of Facebook intrusions into just_about_every_freakin_website I visited. (Thankfully, not here!)
A few days ago, I became sufficiently annoyed and added http://www.facebook.com to my hosts file.