The Commissioner will look into whether the changes actually
worsened the situation, making it more likely for the private
information of users to be published.
The Privacy Commissioner's office said that a number of people
object to the changes introduced by the social networking giant. It
said that this investigation was prompted by one particular
complaint about the way that Facebook changed its privacy settings
in December of last year.
"The complaint focuses on a tool introduced by Facebook in
mid-December 2009, which required users to review their privacy
settings," said the Commissioner's office in a statement. "The
complainant alleges that the new default settings would have made
his information more readily available than the settings he had
previously put in place."
In December Facebook did not actually change users' settings but
did invite them to use a new tool for controlling their privacy
settings. That tool's default position was to make quite a lot of
information available to a wide network of Facebook users, and
would have made more information available than was previously
typically the case.
While users could use the tool to restrict the spread of
information, many users typically agree to accept the default
settings chosen by the publishers of software and makers of web
services.
“The individual’s complaint mirrors some of the concerns that
our Office has heard and expressed to Facebook in recent months,”
said assistant commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who was responsible
for last year's Facebook investigation.
“Some Facebook users are disappointed by certain changes being
made to the site – changes that were supposed to strengthen their
privacy and the protection of their personal information," she
said.
The Commissioner's investigation last year found that Facebook
was not clear enough about how users of the service could control
access to their information and did not do enough to stop other
companies accessing it.
The investigation found that information on how to change
privacy settings and delete accounts was hard to find and
confusing.
Facebook's attempts to fix those problems, though, may have
caused others. "Changes to the site’s privacy information, settings
and tools have sparked criticism from users who feel that personal
information posted to the site is, in some instances, even more
exposed now than before," said the Commissioner's office.
Facebook previously faced criticism over its failure to allow
users to delete accounts. They could disable them but could not
prevent their data staying on Facebook servers, present but
invisible to the public.
The company then allowed deletion but faced further criticism
for not making that option obvious enough and for putting it in a
different part of the site to the account disabling function.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this month that he
believed that privacy was no longer a 'social norm'.
"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more
information and different kinds, but more openly and with more
people. That social norm is just something that's evolved over
time," he said in a speech at an electronics trade show.
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