Big Brother Belgium: “Facebook is the Privacy Villain of the Year”

Protecting your privacy online is an upwards struggle and websites typically stores vast sums of data about your identity. Of course, certain services are more guilty of this and have a terrible reputation. In particular, Facebook is known for being a privacy risk and has received a great deal of criticism over the years. Recently, the Big Brother Belgium event which looks into the worst cases of privacy abuse unanimously agreed that Facebook was the worst offender by a considerable margin. Joe McNamee, Executive Director of European Digital Rights argued:

“Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company that has one commodity – you!”

“We nominated Facebook for the award because their default settings are noxious for privacy. To understand what privacy you are giving away when you use Facebook… well, that is impossible. Data algorithms that can make new assumptions about users are being constantly developed – even Facebook today would have difficulty knowing how they will use your data tomorrow.”

Facebook has access to huge sums of data and tracks your personal whereabouts. Even though it’s possible to disable these data collection services, it’s made as difficult as possible through complicated sub-menus. To be fair, it’s not just Facebook which poses a privacy risk and every website or service you visit inhibits your privacy. However, it seems Facebook needs to improve in this area and try to protect user’s data more effectively.