EU Demands Better Privacy for Facebook Users

US, Australian lawmakers voice privacy concerns

(NEWSER) - Facebook kicks 20,000 users under the age of 13 off the site daily, its privacy chief told Australian officials. “There are people who lie,” he said, adding that the site’s methods of catching them aren’t “perfect,” reports Australia’s Daily Telegraph . Almost half of US 12-year-olds use social networks, a Pew study found, while 64% of 13-year-olds and 82% of teens 14 to 17 are on the sites, Fast Company notes. More»

Maryland may ban practice

(NEWSER) - Some employers and colleges have found an ingenious way around Facebook's pesky privacy settings: Simply demand that applicants or students friend you, give you a tour of their account, or even divulge their usernames and passwords. MSNBC reports on a number of places instituting the troubling practices:

• At Maryland's Department of Corrections, job applicants are asked to log in to their account and allow an interviewer to watch as they click through their photos and posts. The Department of Corrections used to ask for username and password outright, but stopped after an ACLU complaint last year.
• Colleges are requiring student athletes to "friend" a coach or school official so that their Facebook posts can be monitored. If they refuse, they don't play. "Each team must identify at least one coach or administrator who is responsible for having access to and regularly monitoring the content of team members’ social networking sites and postings," reads the University of North Carolina handbook.
• Though social media monitoring seems to take place mostly with student athletes, non-athlete college applicants have reported to one lawyer that they were asked for their login information during interviews.

They're also a lot more cautious with their content

(NEWSER) - Women are the less fair sex when it comes to social networking. Ladies are a little more likely to delete friends on sites like Facebook and Twitter than gentlemen are, and a lot more likely to keep their pages private, reports AFP . A Pew Research Center study found that 67% of women say they've deleted friends compared to 58% of men, and women are 19% more likely to set their profile to private. More»

Site is all about sharing, so stop expecting a 'silver bullet' fix: Farhad Manjoo

(NEWSER) - Facebook is submitting to a government crackdown on privacy, and Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges “a bunch of mistakes” on that front. But the site’s privacy issues are as much our own fault as Zuck’s, writes Farhad Manjoo in Slate . The “idea that we can control the audience for anything we post online” is simply “misguided,” he writes. “The entire point of Facebook is to allow us to connect and share stuff.” More»

It agrees to independent audits for 20 years

(AP) - Facebook is settling with the FTC over charges it deceived consumers with its privacy settings to get people to share more personal information than they originally agreed to. The charges go back to at least 2009, when Facebook changed its privacy settings so that information users may have deemed private, such as their list of friends, suddenly became viewable to everyone. "They didn't warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance," the FTC said. More»