Facebook Facing $138,000 Fine for Holding Deleted User Data

[snakeair]

Not good... not good at all.

Facebook‘s Ireland offices are being audited, as the company is facing a possible €100,000 ($138,000) fine for retaining data deleted by users, The Guardian reports.

The case began when a 24-year-old Austrian law student, Max Schrems, asked Facebook for copy of all his personal data in June. Facebook complied, sending him a CD containing 1,200 pages of data, including his likes, “friend” and “defriend” history, and chat logs.

The problem? Schrems had deleted some of the data returned to him from his profile, yet Facebook retained his information.

Schrems proceeded to....

Continued at: http://mashable.com/2011/10/21/faceb...ted-data-fine/

[indybail]

Wow! $138,000 fine! That will teach Facebook a thing or two. Isn't that like .001% of their hourly gross income?

[spit]

Originally Posted by indybail

Wow! $138,000 fine! That will teach Facebook a thing or two. Isn't that like .001% of their hourly gross income?

The amount is irrelevant. Bad PR like this opens up Pandora's box, something facebook does not need more of.

[snakeair]

Originally Posted by IanL

This is a new legal issue that FB will has to face.

Yes it is and it's not the first one that they have had. Just like any large business (ex. google), there will always be lawsuits and investigations into there company. The big boss can't police his whole operation. Some part of it is bound to screw up.

[MrSS]

Oh yeah! I knew it, I knew it! Justice will prevail!
Sorry, I can't contain my excitement. I feel excited upon reading the title of this topic and when I read the article, the content and testimony are actually on my mind, I feel good about this happening. Am not anti-facebook, but to their privacy corruption. I have read some articles about this before (sorry I cannot give you some links), but trust me, what being said on the article about privacy like:

“The privacy settings only regulate who can see the link to a picture. The picture itself is “public” on the internet. This makes it easy to circumvent the settings,” says another.

is exactly the thought of the author from one I've read before.

That's why I stop using facebook, am not getting tired to say that again and again. I stop using facebook when I discovered they stored still the deleted information of a user. I really admire Mark Zuckerberg logic, he almost reach the finish line: "it’s very tricky to permanently delete a message you’ve sent another user, as the other user also has the right to keep his/her copy" but not convincing enough, try again!

Of course, for Facebook, the negative publicity could be more damaging than the amount of the fine.

Will this now open the exit door? leading to facebook's depreciation and loss? I know a broken trust is like a paper, no matter how hard you try to rectify it, you can never retain it's original form. Sorry facebook. Last time they won a lawsuit about "face" in their trademark, but how could they escape this? I'm excited to know.
Yes this fine is not enough and should go with more sanction and investigation. No amount of money can retain a person's stolen information.

In February 2009, Facebook changed its Terms of Service ...

Indeed. They revised their TOS many times before, for the reason of privacy issue and very one sided, all favor goes to them, and the user will leave no choice but to agree.

I do some basic search in Google, no operators, just a plain keyword. Guess what, all the content of results are somewhat recurring however good enough to say people have one thought, they critic the faceboook in different way but presenting same points:
10 reasons to stop facebook
reasons to stop facebook
reasons to stop using facebook
reasons to hate facebook

Opinion only, no hurt feelings.

Thanks.

[Dreamrage]

Inevitably, everyone is going to have a positive and a negative outlook on anything in life online. Facebook has been naughty as well as a lot of other really well known sites, but still they remain popular to an extent, some even become more popular.

Some people are ok with it all, and some aren't, but IMHO, if a site/company says that they value a person's privacy, then they should step up to the plate and back it up, or be willing to take the consequences for their actions. I hope that in lieu of this, that facebook will review their policies and start doing what they say they would do. Or it could just end up like another myspace (IMO)

[Pinky Painter]

Facebook has plenty servers to store all the old data. What I curious is our messages at Facebook is actually 'archive' when we click "x" of the thread. That make me wondered if the deleted message are still able to retrieve?

[howardbateman]

This is really a shocking news.But this should be done to teach a lesson to Facebook supportive team.

[ayushgupta]

haha nice. This is good punishment

[serena85]

I still do not understand why they are keeping the deleted accounts, they don't have enough users or what?

[MrSS]

serena85,
The reason is database power. Database is the basis on measuring the power of a certain company, except the monetary aspect. The bigger their database is, the more powerful they be. That's also the reason why some of competitor website (like Friendster) used to get partner or affiliate with Facebook, because since they cannot withstand the competition, they think getting on Facebook's wings and popularity will make their stability better. But it's not, the logic will like predation, eventually those who get partnership with Facebook will take away their database and loosing their business. Same thing in business shares, the stock holder having more share can get (buy) the share of lower stock holder leading to elimination of the lower stock holder.

Furthermore, those gathered information can be shared to their 3rd party clients for advertisement purposes. Because of the information a user used to input on their profile and by saving its activity, Facebook can now target audience for their client's ads with ease. For worse, they will share these information without the user's permission.

[cldnails]

Can't say I'm shocked, I'm amazed at the facebooking of society, how willing they are to just throw personal info at any old website now.

[weber77]

Whooa!! I never thought that facebook will face such problem especially how it stores/deletes data from users. Maybe its a technical issue.

[davelev]

Everyone holds all sorts of data, not just Facebook. I bet Gmail and everyone else is doing it.

Nowadays information, data is considered valuable. Some even buy and sell...

I'm more bothered by the scam-spy-adware-virus plugins, programs on Facebook that live like parasites in accounts.

138.000 fine is ridiculous for Facebook. Even 138 million would mean nothing to them.

Why not donate it to the poor, sick, elderly, orphans etc.?

[RiptideTempora]

OP: What's not good? That they have such policies, or that they're getting fined for them?

I'm an outspoken critic of abusive data retention. Not only is it a privacy concern, but it's a waste of perfectly good disk space that could be used to serve end users better (and depending on how your server is set up, speed up swap memory management a tad).

[snakeair]

More related news.

Okay, everybody: raise your hands if you believe Facebook’s latest promise not to violate their users’ privacy . . . ?

I didn’t think so. But it’s nice that they still care enough to respond to a formal complaint by the FTC, isn’t it?

The red-star words in the FTC complaint describe Facebook’s statements to its users regarding privacy as “Unfair” and “Deceptive.” It’s worth the read. The complaint raises many complaints in detail. Much of it centers around the fact that the company repeatedly assured its users that if they’ve enabled privacy controls on the stuff they post to Facebook, then there’s no way, no how, no foolin’, for ad networks or Facebook apps to get access to it. Meanwhile, the truth turned out to be more like “Yes, Of Course, and Why The Hell Not?”

Plus, in instances where Facebook promised to streamline privacy settings and make them more effective, the online tools they provided...

Continued at: http://www.suntimes.com/business/916...an-to-you.html

[rjr]

lmao! Yeah, right.

Facebook's slogan should be, "It's not illegal, til you get caught.".

[GlobeGenius]

That is kind of funny. The lawyers bill would have been more than the fine.

[digiboom]

Shocked anyone still uses the site.

of course people are sheep and will use stuff even when they know their information is being misused

[karvy1]

$138,000 ?? even I would like to ask for a copy of my facebook data!