Personal Information: Facebook passes the test of the Irish authorities

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The Commissioner of the Irish Data Protection (DPC) published Wednesday, December 21, the results of a survey on the social network Facebook. “While the audit reports are rarely made public, the DPC and Facebook have decided to mutual agreement, and in the interest of transparency, the entire contents of the audit would be made public ” , says the social network, in a statement.

“The audit showed a positive approach and commitment Facebook Ireland to comply with the privacy of its users ” , says the Irish. But Facebook should include working to “simpler explanations of its policy on privacy” and “easy access and a development of this policy” . The result of this audit, which was held for three months, was highly anticipated. The international headquarters of the social network, which claims more than 800 million subscribers, is indeed located in Dublin.

In its report of nearly 150 pages, the supervisor reviewed the services offered by the social network. Of the granularity of privacy settings for the transmission of data via third-party applications, through facial recognition on photos.

This report is published when a group of Austria, Europe versus Facebook , filed in September 22 complaints about several features of the social network. Schrems Max , a law student living in Vienna, also accuses Facebook of having preserved many information it had published then deleted on the social network. He also suspected of Facebook to create the “ghost profiles”, gathering information on people who have not created accounts, without the having said.

But according to the CPD, “while some information that could be used to establish what some call a ‘shadow profile‘ of someone who is new to Facebook Facebook are received by, any such use of n ‘ is made of such data ” .

Concerning the system of identifying individuals photographed by facial recognition, the Commissioner also notes that Facebook should have introduced this feature “a more appropriate” . Other protection devices, especially in Germany, decided to conduct a thorough investigation of this service.

For the button “I”, which allows users to indicate their interests on the social network, but also Web sites that have integrated the Irish Commissioner requires anonymisation of information, and a deletion in a possible maximum of 90 days. CPD welcomes that the “social modules” are not used by Facebook for targeted advertising.