Countries Throw a Book at Facebook: Sid Harth

Facebook and its controversial privacy policies are teeming with new complications as regulators overseas increasingly start to regard them as a suspicious, Americanising import.

This week, data protection officials in Hamburg, Germany, sent a menacing missive in Facebook's direction, accusing the social network of partaking in illegal activities by retaining data about people who aren't members of the site but whose contact information may have come into its possession through members' email importer tools. Last year, the privacy commissioner in Canada put significant pressure on Facebook to simplify its privacy controls, citing concerns that were pulled back into the spotlight when a Toronto law firm filed suit against Facebook this month, for which it's seeking class-action status.

There will be more incidents like these. Facebook's privacy policies, however maligned by advocacy groups, have thus far held up decently well in the US; a coalition of senators who called attention to the amount of data that Facebook shares with third parties quietened down when the social network made some modifications. But more than three quarters of Facebook's users live outside the US, in countries where laws are different, and where lawmakers are much less likely to agree with the Facebook concept — or even the American concept — of online privacy.

“It's the essence of Facebook that you, as a US resident, are able to reconnect with that transfer student from Paraguay from when you were in sixth grade,” said Paul Bond, an attorney with law firm Reed Smith who specialises in data protection and privacy. “That global operational reality is challenged to the breaking point by the patchwork of privacy laws in different countries. The fact of the matter is, while people on social-media networks want to be able to seamlessly interact with one another, they are citizens of nations. Those nations have their own rules with regard to data privacy protection, and they expect them to follow those rules.”

Facebook representatives were not immediately available to answer a question about how it currently deals with data protection regulations in different countries.

It's not that the Facebook juggernaut is unwelcome overseas. Politicians, candidates and regulators around the world near-universally understand the power of the social network and its connections, with fan pages a crucial part of election efforts geared to young voters and interest groups now virtual home bases for activism. And Facebook has even begun formal collaborations with governments. On Friday, it announced a partnership with the office of the British Prime Minister on “The Spending Challenge”, a project to crowd-source solutions to the country's budget deficit.

But that doesn't mean they're all willing to accept what Facebook's selling them with regard to how it handles user data, from how long it retains information from deleted accounts to how much of a member's profile can be shared with third-party partners. The privacy regulations of a company or a sovereignty are as much reflections of a culture's ethical values as they are fine-print rules. And the strict data protection laws of many European countries, particularly Germany, emerged out of the psychic scars of autocratic governments. This has created complications for many a US tech company: the EU sparred with Microsoft, and it's still not through with Google — particularly its tight-lipped search algorithms and the alleged intrusions of Google Street View. Now, with Facebook's profile ever growing in Europe, it's a bigger priority for regulators.

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