News

Facebook's sharing of user data raises concerns

September 25, 2012

More issues are being raised about Facebook privacy and the social networking site's practice of sharing user data. 

According to an article on The Times of India, Facebook is using the services of Datalogix, a data mining company that collects information about shoppers from brick-and-mortar stores and analyzes the influences that drove them to make a purchase. 

Last month, according to the article, Facebook allowed brands using the site to target users through their email IDs and phone numbers, enabling the brands to reach Facebook users who never visit their Facebook page.

Advocacy groups are up in arms, and have pointed out that the practice could violate Facebook's $9.5 million settlement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which mandated that the site make it clear to users when it plans to share their information beyond what is stated in the privacy settings.

The ACLU weighed in on the privacy concerns, with the group's principal technologist and senior policy analyst, Christopher Soghoian, explaining his proposal of the Do Not Track protocol. 

"Do Not Track is an attempt to escape the existing arms race in online privacy (in which tech companies build a technology to protect users' privacy, and then the online advertising companies engineer around it)," Soghoian told TOI. "Unfortunately, the big ad companies and their partners see DNT as a threat to their very survival, and have deployed armies of lobbyists to fight it in Washington D.C., Brussels and in the W3C standards body. It is unclear who will win."

Read more about social media.