When Facebook rolled out its new privacy policy at the end of January, it must have known that it would cause some outrage in Europe. And, sure enough, it has: EU data protection officials have responded by setting up a taskforce to deal with those parts of the policy which it believes are almost certain to break EU privacy laws.
The social network’s new privacy policy appears to be more of an anti-privacy policy, allowing data sharing between its various services like the Atlas ad unit, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, and tracking users across most of the web via third-party websites and apps that use its services (e.g., by offering the Like button, or Facebook Login).
The latest development comes on top of the lawsuit we reported last month, brought by the Austria-based privacy group “Europe vs Facebook.” EU authorities have reacted with indignation bordering on fury over Facebook’s claims that it’s free to share personal data with third parties and use any photos or content posted to its site for commercial purposes.
Belgium’s State Secretary for Privacy, Bart Tommelein, said that the network’s policies “flagrantly go against general privacy policy laws in Europe.” She added:
“These are several things that really go too far, we think, and the task force will investigate them.”
The taskforce will be led by officials from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and possibly Italy, although Belgian and Dutch authorities have already started their own national investigations into the new policy.
After its investigation, the taskforce will tell Facebook what it thinks is wrong with the privacy policy. Should Facebook refuse any modifications, the taskforce could pass its complaints to the EU’s national privacy authorities, each if which could take independent action against the social media giant.
In a sense, there’s nothing especially new in Facebook’s policy – Google, for example, already does most of that stuff. But it, too, has fallen foul of the EU as a result.
Both of these American leviathans may have underestimated the strength of the EU’s commitment to data privacy and Facebook is almost certainly looking down the barrel of a formidable struggle.
