http://www.euronews.com/ Protecting our personal data has never been more important, amid the growing threat of cybercrime and identity theft. 


Many feel we have lost control over who knows what about us online. Our exact location can even now be tracked.

The notion of a private life has changed, as hundreds of millions connect on social networking sites.

But what happens to all that information? Austrian law student Max Schrems tried to find out.

He was surprised when Facebook agreed to send him more than 1200 pages of data it had about him, even stuff he had long deleted.

Schrems made 22 complaints to the data protection commissioner in Dublin, where Facebook in Europe is based, and where an audit was already planned.

“A lot of very sensitive information was in there,” said Schrems. “So, for example, there were all my deleted messages in there. And by just searching individual words – you can type in for example all the political parties that exist in Austria – and within a blink of a second you know what I was voting for, or which I’m in favour of, because of course I was discussing in private chats with other people about, I don’t know, recent political developments.

“But all that is retained for three, four, five years, or probably 10 years in the end,” he added. “And that is something that is really new, that one individual company holds that much information about one individual user. And I do think that a lot of it is not very transparent and communicated to the user in a way that they really understand that.”

Euronews’ Seamus Kearney reports that as a result of the investigation carried out in Dublin, Facebook has agreed to a number of changes on its website to meet privacy rules.

Richard Allan, the Director of Policy at Facebook told euronews: “We are a service where people come and voluntarily disclose information to the service. They post it on the service in full knowledge of what they’re doing, because we have a very comprehensive data use policy and very clear information actually on the site about what you’re going to be sharing and who you’re going to be sharing it with.

“And we do have facilities … we’ve always had facilities … for people to be able to remove the data once they no longer want it to be on their profile,” he added. “So we feel the service was absolutely in compliance with the principles that the European Union data protection framework is based on. But what the Irish have done is come in and suggest areas where we can make that even more effective than today.”

But the case goes on. Both sides are in face-to-face talks, with Irish officials under pressure to formally rule on the complaints.

Surveys show that more than 70 per cent of Europeans are worried about what happens to their data online.

Brussels is proposing a reform of regulations drawn up 17 years ago, sparking widespread debate.

source