Canadians force Facebook to tighten up privacy

The FT reports that:

Facebook announced sweeping changes to its privacy policy on Thursday, after facing threats of legal action from Canada’s privacy commissioner.

Facebook, the social networking site, agreed to limit the amount of data that third-party applications would be automatically granted, in order to clarify the terms around the storage of personal data and to refrain from storing e-mail addresses of people who were invited to join the site but did not sign up. The changes will take Facebook a year to implement.

“We’re satisfied that, with these changes, Facebook is on the way to meeting the requirements of Canada’s privacy law,” said Jennifer Stoddart, privacy commissioner of Canada. “The privacy of people using the site – not only in Canada, but around the world – will be far better protected.”

The other people breathing down Facebook's neck are the European Union and some of its member countries, as Facebook potentially violates some of the conditions of their data protection acts.

Facebook's latest play is to try to encourage users to make more of their information publicly available, but the question one is left with is "why don't US privacy laws offer these basic protections to their own citizens?".

Our advice remains, with all US based services that take a lot of your data, to be careful with what personal data you disclose. Many of their economic models rely on using your data, and with the ongoing failure of Ad-funding models the temptation to slip from use to abuse will be irresistable in some cases. And its a heck of a lot harder to get legal recourse in a foreign country, especially one which seems to have very weak privacy protection laws.

(hat tip Katherine Corrick for pointing out article)