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Updated, 17.35
IRELAND’S DATA PROTECTION COMMISSIONER (DPC) will be asked to investigate the legality of Facebook’s ‘Like’ button in the coming days, after an equivalent German official deemed the feature to be in breach of EU law.
TheJournal.ie has learned that the DPC will shortly receive an official complaint about the button from an Austrian-based lobby group, which has already filed 16 other complaints relating to Facebook’s data handling and privacy settings in the last few days.
If the complaint is successful, Facebook may be forced to adopt radical changes in the way it operates the ubiquitous ‘Like’ feature – or potentially face court action demanding that the feature be disabled for hundreds of millions of worldwide users.
A spokesman for the lobby group, ‘Europe v Facebook‘, said that complaints about the legality of the ‘Like’ button had not specifically been included in its first batch of complaints, filed last week, but that a follow-up complaint dealing specifically with the feature would be lodged in the coming days.
The office of Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, will then examine whether the technology behind the button constitutes a breach of privacy law in this country.
Although the group behind the complaints is based in Austria, the complaints are being filed with the Irish DPC because Facebook’s Terms of Use declares users outside the US and Canada to be in a contract with Facebook Ireland Ltd, the company’s Dublin operation which acts as its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Last week the data protection commissioner in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Thilo Weichert, deemed that the ‘Like’ button was a breach of local, federal and EU law – and said institutions in his state would receive heavy fines if they did not remove the trademark ‘thumbs-up’ button from their sites.
The incoming complaint focuses on how the ‘Like’ button allows Facebook to track the online activity of any web user – even those who are not among the social networking site’s 750 million members worldwide.
By logging the IP addresses of internet users when they visit pages containing an embedded ‘Like’ button, the social network is theoretically able to build a profile of that user’s browsing habits, and then use this to its commercial advantage.
This was illegal under EU law, Weichert argued, because Facebook would harvest this data through web servers based in the US – and not within the EU, as the commissioner said was required.
While Weichert claimed that users could expect their browsing history to be kept on record for around two years, Facebook in response said it deleted such data after 90 days.
A spokesperson for the DPC here told TheJournal.ie that while its office had noted the German decision, it had not yet begun an investigation into whether the ‘Like’ button complied with data protection laws effective in Ireland.
The spokesperson did confirm, however, that the office would examine “different aspects of Facebook Ireland’s compliance with Irish data protection law” in light of any complaints received from the Austrian group.
Among complaints already received are allegations that Facebook retains data – such as status updates, chat messages, photo tags, deleted friendships and ‘pokes’ – even after the user removes them from their own personal profile.
Other complaints filed by the Austrian group include Facebook’s ability to build ‘shadow profiles’ of non-users by harvesting data supplied by other users – such as phonebook databases.
The group also argues that material posted by users on others’ pages can be shared in ways not known to them, and that third-party applications installed by a user’s ‘friends’ can access their own personal data – with no guarantee of privacy standards.
A Facebook spokesperson said the company was aware of the complaints being filed by the Austrian group.
“The Irish Data Protection Commission has well-established procedures for resolving such issues through dialogue with the relevant data controller which we expect to follow in this case,” the spokesperson said.
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It’s all well and good to keep branches open a little later, but it’s of no use to those of us on holidays abroad with no access to our pay.
Or those of us who work shifts! They should immediately give all affected a fee free overdraught. Because of not having had a pay slip issued yet, they refused me cash today….bastards.
that is fckucking terrible Dave. Im facing the same shite on wednesday, and if i dont get my pay slip to them i miss my direct debit and my mortgage payment. And I start nights on wednesday
In the same boat with dd’s but I called a couple of companies yesterday and they said that the dd hadnt been rejected, it was showing as hanging and should go through, just late, when ulster get around to processing it and that as said companies know about the situation they won’t be penalising me.
The same Central Bank that practises”light touch regulation”. I’m sure Ulster Bank are cacking themselves.
That should sort it out so now – no doubt UB were just kicking back until the CB ‘pressed’ them.
Thought the same thing. Finally someone stepped in to have a stern word. It’s about time …
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/25/rbs_natwest_what_went_wrong/
“The tech problems at the RBS banking group that left millions of people unable to access money for four days last week were caused by a failure in a piece of batch scheduling software, sources have told The Register.
And at least some of the support staff for that software have been outsourced to India – as recently as February.”
Here’s how actual regulation works in the US – don’t process cheques for more than 24 hours?
Ok, Federal Reserve steps in. Your bank is probably shut down and its assets redistributed to other banks.
Oh, and how are the cost savings on all those outsourced IT workers looking now? Where are the 1500 workers that were laid off? Too busy to help? Aw shucks. By the way, did you ever catch the guy who was selling a computer with customer data on ebay?
I’m at a bit of a loss here. If they’re dealing with a backlog you would expect that to be cleared in an orderly fashion. My wages were due today, but given what’s going on I didn’t expect to be able to access the funds until the end of week at least. However, this morning when I checked my balance the money was there . Seems a bit odd, don’t u think??
Not alot the central bank can do, problems also in royal bank of scotland and natwest. Its not good for the people who cannot access their accounts.
I posted a cheque to my account last Wednesday and am still waiting for it to be processed and show in my balance. I’m sure things are a lot easier for bankers on a huge salary but when you need the money to buy the necessities and to pay bills, it’s a different story. nMy guess as to what happened is that they were making changes to their systems to allow for changes in transaction fee on accounts and someone fecked something up.
What I heard from an inside source is that they were upgrading the system (CAC7?) that basically is the master plan for every individual batch operation that the runs overnight. This upgrade didn’t go as planned so apparently they rolled back to the older version. It seems that the masterplan was no longer present in the system so no jobs were run overnight and hence the chaos started. This is inline with what The Register are saying.
The story is that this batching activity was moved offshore so I’d imagine there’s some old staff getting some handsome short term contracts to sort this out!!
You’ve got to wonder why they were upgrading all three banks at the same time. It would be bizarre if any bonuses were paid in this bank this year. It’s a basket case and I’m one of their customers. I was fortunate that my wages were processed the day before this happened!
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