Facebook updates privacy policy after Canadian investigation

Social networking giant Facebook will give its privacy settings interface a major update as a result of negotiations with the Canadian privacy commissioner, after the office released a report slamming the site for privacy violations.

A major change will now see third-party application developers specify which categories of information they want to access before they collect any information.

“We have announced plans to give you more control over your information and to help you make more informed choices about privacy,” Tim Sparapani, direct of public policy at Facebook, said in a statement.

“We’ll be making a series of improvements that include notifications and information about privacy settings and practices, additions to Facebook’s privacy policy, and technical changes designed to give people more transparency and control over the information they provide to third-party applications.”

The changes, which will affect all Facebook users worldwide, will include updating the site’s privacy policy to describe the reasons for collecting information such as date of birth, account memorialisation for deceased users and information on how its advertising programs work.

Additionally, Facebook will now encourage users to review their privacy settings to increase the understanding and control a user has over information accessed by third-party applications.

In a major change, a new permissions model will require applications to specify the types of information a developer wants to use.

“We will be communicating regularly with developers about the changes and we’re going to take our time to make sure the outcome is something users understand and that developers have ample time and notice to adapt,” Ethan Beard, director of platform product marketing at Facebook, said in a statement.

The changes come after privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart began an investigation into Facebook a year ago, following complaints from the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.

A subsequent report commissioned by Stoddart accused the site of breaking privacy laws by keeping information about users even after they had closed their accounts, and also accused the site of disclosing information about users to third-party application developers.

Applications often use information from users’ profiles to make their programs more user-specific, such as a quiz application that might take information from a user’s friend’s profile in order to ask questions about that information. Now, developers must specify which information their application needs beforehand.

“Application developers have had virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users’ personal information. The changes Facebook plans to introduce will allow users to control the types of personal information that applications can access,” she said in a statement last week.

“These changes mean that the privacy of 200 million Facebook users in Canada and around the world will be far better protected.”

Facebook engineers will begin making the changes immediately, but due to their complexity the updates and testing should be finished in a year, the site said.