France Gives Facebook Deadline to Act on User Data
Gareth Andrews / 9 years ago
Facebook is one of the world’s largest social networks, containing information about people from all over the world from their names and dates of births to pet hobbies and the messages they’ve sent to their friends. with companies raising concerns about the new ‘Snooper charter’ in the UK, data security awareness is at an all-time high with countries looking to protect their users from breaches like that affecting the Juniper’s hardware. In the latest move, the French Data protection authority has given Facebook a deadline on when they need to take action on several areas of data security.
The first issue the French data authority had was with Facebook’s tracking of non-users on its site, without any warning or notice to the user. This means that even if you went and viewed a public profile, it was recorded that you had viewed the account. The second issue is related to transferring information abroad, a political minefield when it comes to data security.
The second issue is related to transferring information abroad, a political minefield when it comes to data security. In the next three months, Facebook is to stop transferring some data to the United States. This move is not a surprise given that the EU and the U.S. are currently negotiating the successor to the transatlantic safe harbour pact, an agreement that created a legal framework for transferring information from the EU to America. The previous agreement was struck down following the fear that the U.S. government could use it to spy on EU countries similar to its mass surveillance program.