According to Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan, user feedback on draft versions of Facebook's updated data use policy and statement of rights and responsibilities had revealed that despite what the company believed to be improvements in how it explains its policies, it could go further in providing users clarity. The company largely left alone the underlying content of the drafts, instead issuing several “clarifying edits” seeking to justify the changes in those drafts.
For instance, it left intact a revised paragraph making clear that in signing up for the site, users give the company permission to use their details and likeness in connection with advertising or sponsored content served by Facebook, without compensation. This paragraph had changed nothing about the company’s advertising policies and practices, according to Egan.
“We heard this question a lot, so we want to be clear,” she said. “The goal of the update was to clarify language, not to change policies or practices.”
Another contested change — listing Facebook’s intention to expand the use of its facial-recognition technology by proactively gleaning data from users’ profile pictures — would benefit users, Egan said, by giving them more awareness of when a photo featuring their face is uploaded to the site and by thus allowing them to remove a “tag” or ask the uploading user to take it down, if necessary.
None of the changes from the drafts affect the ownership of content, which continues to belong to the user, with Facebook respecting posts and photos that are set to private, according to Egan.
The company did offer one concession to criticism, removing a controversial sentence stating that by signing up to the site, users under the age of 18 had represented that their parent or guardian had given permission on their behalf for the use of their details for advertising or sponsored content.
The update was intended to “help facilitate conversations” between teens and their parents and would not have given the company any additional rights to content that it doesn’t already possess, but Facebook agreed with feedback that the language involved was confusing, “so we removed the sentence,” Egan said.
The proposed changes were first rolled out in August, spurred by a judge’s approval of a contested $20 million privacy settlement that also required the company to give users more information on how their names and likenesses are used in advertising displayed as part of the site’s Sponsored Stories program.
For the proposal's rollout, Facebook asked for user feedback on the changes, prompting thousands of user comments and a backlash by a number of privacy groups, who filed several petitions with the Federal Trade Commission to halt the changes. The groups argued that the updated policies violated a 2011 settlement the company had reached with the FTC for allegedly deceiving users about the privacy and security of their information on the site.
The groups were later joined in their concerns by a number of lawmakers, who have variously asked Facebook to justify or roll back the changes, and requested the company give users more control over their privacy on the site.
Facebook also faced a backlash over its widely criticized Beacon program, which shared data about users’ activity on third-party sites with their Facebook friends without consent. That resulted in Facebook's paying out $9.5 million to settle a class action over the feature in 2009.
--Additional reporting by Allison Grande and Juan Carlos Rodriguez. Editing by Edrienne Su.
