Facebook is facing a fresh backlash after being accused of flouting privacy laws when tens of thousands of users unwittingly handed over personal information to third-party companies.
It is not the first time Facebook’s privacy policy has been called into question. It is already facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit in the US and class action lawyers are urging others to join.
The latest controversy surrounds a new feature launched last week which was designed to make shopping and signing up for alerts on deals easier. Users have to give permission to the application and website before the information may be shared but the scheme was suspended after only two days following a raft of complaints.
Part of the problem arose from the way it started the new feature. Facebook did not make an official announcement explaining what it was doing and confirming this would not be a privacy issue. The company has been in trouble in the past because of its confusing privacy policies. This seemed to add to the confusion.
The whole issue of how Facebook monetises the site has been vexing Facebook bosses for months. The business was recently valued at $50bn but makes an annual profit of $600m, yet every time it tries to cash in on the data it holds on 600 million users it faces a backlash.
San-Francisco marketing firm Rapleaff is one of a number of firms which offers Facebook data for marketing purposes, although, having been caught selling individual data such as phone number and email addresses, it now only offers anonymous data.
The main issue seems to be how the data is harvested. Often consent is unwittingly given by signing up for apps and competitions as the wording is often not prominent. As Julius Harper, a user who led a 200,000-strong group which protested about marketing data, said: “Facebook gets caught invading your privacy, it apologies, says it is amending the problem, and the whole thing starts all over again.”
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