Senators Call Out Facebook On ‘Instant Personalization’, Other Privacy Issues
Last week, Facebook launched some major new products, including social plugins, its Like button for the web, and its Open Graph API. It also launched a product that has some serious privacy issues: “Instant Personalization”, which automatically hands over some of your data to certain third-party sites as soon as you visit them, without any action required on your part. I’ve previously discussed at length why I think this could lead to a major backlash. And now four Democratic US Senators — Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken — are calling on Facebook to change its policies.
This morning the senators sent a letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg that details these issues (they’ve also separately reached out to the FTC, urging it to establish more rules around social networks). Here are the senators’ three main concerns, along with my own commentary:
Check also related entries:
- Facebook Wants To Know If You’d Mind Sharing All Of Your Information
- Facebook Launches Instant Personalization On TripAdvisor
- Yahoo Serves 6 Million Different Home Pages Per Day
- Facebook Considering New Laws And Legal Action Against Employers Asking For Users’ Passwords
- Sharpen The Pitchforks. It’s Almost Time For Facebook’s Privacy Wake-Up Call