Student privacy campaigners plan to sue over Facebook

Charlie Osborne:

Campaigners europe-v-facebook are planning legal action concerning Facebook in Ireland over the social network's adherence to privacy and data protection.

The Austrian privacy campaign group said Tuesday that changes and concessions made by the social networking giant do not go far enough, even after a year of campaigns -- and so plan to take on the Irish DPA.

Europe-v-facebook most notably won a petition to force Facebook to turn off its facial recognition feature in Europe. In addition, due to the campaigner's complaints, Facebook now has to limit retention periods for certain data sets, and the firm must also disclose more information on how much data it holds for individual users.

However, after numerous complaints to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, privacy regulations are still "miles away from other European data protection authorities in its understanding of the law," and "Facebook gave the authority the runaround," the group said in a statement.

The group subsequently published a 70-page response (.pdf) to the Irish audit, dubbed a "counter report" which details all alleged violations of European law after a request from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. Max Schrems, speaker for europe-v-facebook, said that the report discovered the Irish authority has "not always delivered accurate and correct results," and the group wonder if "blind trust" of the tech giant may have impeded the original audit.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 5, 2012 3:14 AM
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