A media report said that the Facebook is facing a restriction in Europe for gathering its users’ personal information and “selling” the same to advertisers.
By 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, The Sunday Telegraph 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.
The vice-president of European Commission, Viviane Reding 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. In his speech, he also said “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 what is the purposes for which the data is collected.”
However, Facebook has denied the claims.
