LONDON: Facebook is facing a
crackdown in Europe for harvesting its users' personal information and
"selling" the same to advertisers, a media report said.
The European Commission is
planning to stop the way the popular social networking website
"eavesdrops" on its users to gather information about their political
opinions, sexuality, religious beliefs -- and even their whereabouts,
'The Sunday Telegraph' reported.
Using sophisticated
software, Facebook collects information from people's activities on the
social networking site -- whatever their individual privacy settings --
and make it available to advertisers, www.swarooptheking.net it claimed.
However, following
concerns over the privacy implications of the practice, a new European
Commission directive, is to be introduced in January, which will ban
such advertising unless users specifically allow it, the newspaper said.
Even though most of the
information it harvests is stored on computers in the USA, if Facebook
fails to comply with the new legislation it may face legal action.
Viviane Reding, the
vice-president of European Commission, said the directive would amend
current European data protection laws in the light of technological
advances and ensure consistency in how offending firms are dealt with
across the EU.
"I call on service
providers -- especially social media sites -- to be more transparent
about how they operate. Users must know what data is collected and
further processed (and) for what purposes."
Facebook has, however,
denied the claims. A spokesman for the company said: "We do not share
people's names with an advertiser without a person's explicit consent
and we never sell personal information to third parties."
Source:timesofindia.com
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