Max Schrems, of EU v. Facebook fame, is speaking at an event on 'The Politics of Surveillance' at the Uni of Ottawa: http://www.digitallymediatedsurveillance.ca/
A massive amount of information has emerged from the efforts of Max and five friends who met in his living-room, amplified by 40,000 people who've exercised the right to request from Facebook copies of their personal data. His original motivation was blunt statements in public by Facebook in the US, to the effect that European Data Protection law could be safely ignored. Coverage in Europe was never hard to achieve. US media took no notice of the actions until Schrems forced Facebook to stop applying facial recognition. The complaint process was begun, of necessity through the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, in August 2011. Many complaints require pursuit through the courts, because the Irish Commissioner has himself frequently breached Irish data protection law, which itself is probably in breach of EU law. It may cost EUR 300,000 to force key issues to a senior Irish court, and then it might need to be appealled to a European court. European law to which Facebook is arguably subject requires accessibility to data by the data subject. It also creates fairly specific requirements in relation to Terms or Privacy Policy and consent. Facebook has been in breach of many of them, and continues to be so in many respects. After 40,000 access requests, including action to force the hand of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, it's apparent that Facebook holds c.100 data-sets held about each individual. (Examples: Pokes, Removed Friends, Emails, cookies, shadow profiles extracted from third parties - which extends to 3-5 removed). So far, Facebook has been forced to provide (heavily redacted) access to 22 of them. It's not a pretty sight, but there's progress. Hill K. (2012) 'Max Schrems: The Austrian Thorn In Facebook's Side' Forbes Magazine, 7 February 2014, at http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/07/the-austrian-thorn-in-facebooks-side/ O'Brien K.J. (2012) 'Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook' The New York Times, 5 February 2012, at http://europe-v-facebook.org/FAQ_ENG.pdf http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Schrems Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list Link@mailman.anu.edu.au http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link