If you delete an email or remove a tag from a photo on Facebook, you have a right to believe that the email is gone, or that there is no longer a record of the tag. But in a recent case in Austria, a 24-year-old law student found that Facebook saved everything forever, even items he had explicitly deleted.
According to an article on the Guardian's Website, Max Schrems requested a CD from Facebook with all his content after attending a lecture by a Facebook executive and apparently not liking what he heard. To its credit, Facebook complied, but to Schrems' surprise, he found his entire Facebook history was intact on the site, including Friend requests he ignored, people he had un-Friended, deleted emails, and photos retaining tags he had removed.
Shrems complained to the Irish Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for these complaints in Europe. The commission is investigating. If found guilty of violating Schrems' privacy, Facebook could be subject to a 100,000 euro fine ($137,750 in US dollars, according to Sunday's exchange rate). That may be a drop in the bucket for a company like Facebook, but a ruling against the company could open the floodgates for similar complaints, and that could get very costly indeed.
And after spending some time last week at the ARMA International Conference & Expo for recordkeeping and data governance professionals, I watched this story through a different prism than perhaps I normally would. That's because recordkeepers are a particularly paranoid bunch. They don't really like social media on the open Web -- or just about anything that's outside their direct control.
One of the issues that recordkeepers have with cloud services in general is the idea of deleting data. When your company could be subject to e-discovery requests regarding social media or any content stored in the cloud, you need to know that deleted content is actually deleted. And when you read an article like the one on the Guardian site, it could make you want to lock down the entire operation, rightly or wrongly.
Sure, it's definitely better to set realistic governance policies around all social media and to establish realistic social media archiving policies. It's all well and good to tell the folks responsible for records in the enterprise to be realistic, but they need to have some reasonable assurance that when someone deletes something, it's actually deleted.
That's because businesses are sued all the time, and they are subject to rules of electronic discovery. When a plaintiff's lawyer asks for information on a certain topic and you say confidently those records have been deleted within your clearly defined record retention policies, you want to know they really have been taken down.
If Facebook isn't actually deleting those emails or other interactions, and you believe they were deleted, your company can be in big trouble if it turns out those records actually exist somewhere.
That's why Facebook must establish a clearer policy on deleting content. Individuals and businesses have a right to delete their content, and there has to be a way to ensure that, once you've deleted it, it's going to be gone -– really gone -- in a reasonable amount of time.
This is a case where the stricter privacy policies in place in Europe might end up benefiting us all in the long run if Facebook is forced to change its policies and remove deleted content from its servers once and for all.
— Ron Miller is a freelance technology journalist, blogger, FierceContentManagement editor, and contributing editor at EContent magazine.
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb f***s.
So if anyone is interested there is a Bootcamp here Nov 1 - "Learn how to become the next Zuckerberg -- not the next Winklevoss!"
I have to say my perspective is more like yours -- there's nothing nefarious about it, just Facebook wanting to make sure you could change your mind later; I wouldn't mind, for example, seeing 'which friends have I deleted' and so on. On the other hand, I certainly see Ron's point about ediscovery, which was an angle I hadn't thought of.
I agree with Kim that that the data is rich for market intelligence and studying user's behavior and this is why Facebook may not want to get rid of it. However, I don't think it's a big deal to put an "inactive" check against the data so that it gets filtered out when they provide the data to the users.
Actually, the idea of plain laziness makes sense. It requires work to start parsing through all user info, isolating some things and deleting others, sometimes permanently, sometimes temporarily. That requires policies, coding, resources. Perhaps FB simply doesn't want to sink the effort into it right now -- especially if it doesn't have to by law.
I am honestly hoping that decisive action by a regulator, here or in Europe, will lead to a change in attitude.
@Kim, I am not sure what decisive action regulators will take. So it would be better if FB users teach a lesson to FB by boycotting it for some brief period.
There's a data race going on right now, with the assumption that the holders of the biggest collections of data will win. Of course, the ability of extract value from data is essential: a big, unanalyzable data set is no use to anyone.
But the thought seems to be, grab the data first, store everything, and worry about handling it later. Facebook, despite its feverish scramble for data, is actually lagging behind financial institutions and other organizations in terms of what it collects.
Facebook may be subject to just plain laziness, or compulsive saving disorder. Someone says to take it down, but they just forget, or don't get around to it. Maybe a bit of OCD in the ranks, forces a need to keep everything no matter what!
Well, yes that much i appreciate. Information is valuable and cheap enough to store. I'm looking deeper at that value. That makes them unwilling to lose even a single bit of information about anyone. In the belief that they will need it someday in the future.
The key to understanding the mind of the marketologist is to let go of the idea that individual actions matter. Sure, you read an article about shoes, and you see a shoe ad. But the big picture is considerably more complicated. The photo that you "like" may simply help to put you into a certain demographic pile. Maybe X% of people who clicked on photos with a caption that included the word Y are also likely to be interested in a sale at American Apparel. Maybe you are identifying yourself as a "mouse potato" or "indie-lectual" (actual marketing terms).
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Empowered CMOs, Empowered Customers Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are at a crossroads. Like CFOs a decade ago, their position in the organization is about to change dramatically, impacting not only traditional marketing functions like public relations and promotion, but also requiring a greater partnership with fellow C-suite decision makers. In interviews with over 1,700 CMOs worldwide, IBM found that CMOs are keenly aware of their specific set of challenges. READ THIS eBOOK
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just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb f***s.
