The site wants its users to review and comment on the policy
ahead of its adoption. Facebook said that when the seven-day
comment period ends on Thursday it will "review your feedback and
update you on our next steps".
Canada's Privacy Commissioner said earlier this year that
Facebook's privacy policies and practices broke its privacy laws.
Facebook vowed to change its policies and make them clearer.
Facebook acknowledged that its new policy was designed to meet the
Canadian Commissioner's demands.
"In this revision, we're fulfilling our commitment to the
Privacy Commissioner of Canada to update our privacy policy to
better describe a number of practices," said Facebook
communications and public policy executive Elliot Schrage in a
statement.
"Specifically, we've included sections that further explain the
privacy setting you can choose to make your content viewable by
everyone, the difference between deactivating and deleting your
account and the process of memorializing an account once we've
received a report that the account holder is deceased," he
said.
The policy is unusual in that it is the result of an attempt to
write in plain English rather than the legalistic jargon often
employed in website privacy policies and lists of terms and
conditions of use.
"This is the next step in our ongoing effort to run Facebook in
an open and transparent way. In April, we launched a new system of
governance for the Facebook site and became the first company to
our knowledge that invites users to both comment and vote on
proposed changes to its governing policies," said Schrage. "Our
primary goals remain transparency and readability, which is why
we've used plain language and included numerous examples to help
illustrate our points."
The policy governs how Facebook uses the enormous amount of
users' personal information that passes through the service. It
outlines how users can control the visibility of personal
information and tells them of the limitations of that control.
Information posted or sent to other users, for example, are out of
their control and are governed by the other user's privacy
settings.
The policy also governs the use of personal information in the
advertising that appears on the site. It makes it clear that even
the personal information which a user has chosen to hide can be
used as the basis of targeted advertising.
"We allow advertisers to choose the characteristics of users who
will see their advertisements and we may use any of the
non-personally identifiable attributes we have collected (including
information you may have decided not to show to other users, such
as your birth year or other sensitive personal information or
preferences) to select the appropriate audience for those
advertisements," says the policy.
"For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you
ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment
company who you are. You can see the criteria advertisers may
select by visiting our advertising page. Even though we do not
share your information with advertisers without your consent, when
you click on or otherwise interact with an advertisement there is a
possibility that the advertiser may place a cookie in your browser
and note that it meets the criteria they selected," it says.
As online services have become more personalised and social
networking has grown, privacy policies which govern what a company
does with personal data have become more important. But at the same
time they have become more lengthy and complex, with the average
length now 2,500 words, according to research published last
year.
Web standards body the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) attempted
to automate privacy preferences but that project was dropped in
2007 when browser manufacturers failed to back it, W3C's Rigo
Wenning recently told podcast OUT-LAW Radio.
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