The U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently revealed that it would settle its suit with Facebook over the way it changed its privacy controls in 2009.
The settlement, which was first announced in November 2011, will require the world's most popular social network to go through regular government audits of its privacy policy every other year for the next 20, according to a report from the
Insurance Journal. While the agreement does not require the company to admit it did anything wrong, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg admitted soon after the initial announcement was made that it had made mistakes in handling user privacy.
The agreement also requires Facebook to obtain consent from users before uniformly changing their privacy settings, the report said. It will also be unable to misrepresent any proposed changes related to the
privacy protection or security of users' data.
Eduard Goodman, the chief privacy officer for
Identity Theft 911, writes regularly on his official blog about the many ways in which personal data can be shared and accessed on social networking sites.
© 2003-2012 IDentity Theft 911, LLC. All Rights Reserved