Facebook has reportedly settled a sweeping and nagging privacy complaint pending in the US; this after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had accused the popular social networking platform of trying to deceive its users by not honoring promises to keep their personal details private.
The agreement that was announced earlier this week, apparently brings to fore the complaining voices in the backdrop of major changes that the company made almost two years ago to the manner in which it deals with sensitive information about its over 800 million users. Its chief executive Mark Zuckerberg defended overall handling of Facebook users’ personal information in a post published just after the settlement was made public, although he also stated: “I am the first to admit that we have made a bunch of mistakes.”
Among a rather ‘small number of high-profile mistakes’, according to him, were the launch of Beacon four years ago. Beacon was touted as an advertising system that reported purchases made by users to their Facebook contacts. He also referred to the series of changes made in 2009, which affected all Facebook users’ privacy settings.
The FTC commented that on its part, it believed the social networking company had indeed breached the prevailing US Fair Trade Act provisions by allowing private information to be shared with other people or to be made public ‘repeatedly’. The agency though, doesn’t have the power to slap any fine on the company, added that it had managed to extract an agreement from the latter not to purposely override its users’ privacy settings sans seeking ‘affirmative express consent’.
It said Facebook had agreed to carrying independent audits every two years of its existing privacy practices for the next two decades that echoes a similar verification process after complaints regarding privacy breaches in Buzz, Google’s former social networking service. Most privacy advocates welcomed the settlement. An official of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who had led in 2009 a complaint to the FTC along with clutch of other privacy organizations stated, “It’ll give users of Facebook greater control over the information that they post on the service.”
However, he criticized the agency for not coaxing Facebook into re-switching its privacy settings to their more stringent levels before 2009, allowing it to continue to utilize user information that he claimed had been ‘improperly obtained’. Among the Facebook breaches mentioned by the FTC were the changes, which made information previously designated as private like lists of friends. “They did not warn users that this particular change was coming, or get their nod in advance,” the agency pointed out.
Regarding the privacy debate and alleged breaches, Facebook contended that it had already brought about changes to its relevant procedures in order to rectify most of the problems underlined by the US regulators.
