EU Commission to Facebook: Grow Up!

Michael Hedges February 1, 2010 Follow on Twitter

“No one cares about privacy anymore,” opined 25 year old Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently. Young people, he waxed sociological, don’t know privacy and don’t care about it. His contemporaries may yet be living in university housing – or their mothers’ – with toys as their sole possessions but the adults have a different perspective.

EU Commissioner Viviane Reding disagreed with Mr. Zuckerberg and other Web 2.0 business builders. In a policy address (January 28) Commissioner Reding, whose new portfolio at DG Justice includes privacy policy, said Facebook, Twitter, et.al. must concern themselves with personal data protection. The speech coincided with Data Privacy Day.

The European Commission’s (EC) Data Protection Directive was written in 1995, when Mr. Zuckerberg was barely 10 years old. Commissioner Reding intends updating that Directive as a priority.

As EC Information Society and Media (DG Infos) Commissioner, Reding took on the long arduous process of updating the Television Without Frontiers Directive for the 21st century. Speaking to the Data Privacy Day workshops, she said a "clear, modern set of rules" on privacy policy are at the top of the agenda. With the seating of the new EC Executive, DG Infos will be effectively replaced by DG Digital Agenda, headed by former DG Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

Many companies – and governments – have faced the steely gaze of Commissioners Reding and Kroes. Judgments over the last decade make EC regulation the bar to pass for multi-nationals on competition issues. The newly adopted Lisbon Treaty gives EU Commissioners greater leverage to bring EU Member States – and any multi-national operating within - into compliance.

“I have had many opportunities to see the impressive power of innovation of information society and the creation of exciting and promising new products and services,” Reding continued. “Unfortunately, privacy and the protection of personal data were not always a key ingredient at the early development stage of these products and services.” The Barosso Commission is broadly supportive of innovation, particularly through digital technology, hence the shift from ‘information society’ to ‘digital agenda’.

“EU rules are there to protect everyone's personal data,” explained Commissioner Reding. “EU rules should allow everyone to realize their right to know when their personal data can be lawfully processed, in any area of life, whether boarding a plane, opening a bank account or surfing the Internet, and to say no to it whenever they want.”

“Innovation is important in today's society but should not go at the expense of people's fundamental right to privacy,” she said. “Facebook, MySpace or Twitter have become extremely popular, particularly among young people. However children are not always able to assess all risks associated with exposing personal data.”

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” said Zuckerberg at the CES (January 11) to the joyful noise of all other developers of privacy invasive technology. “That social norm is just something that's evolved over time." In other words, “Get over it.”

Social media – Facebook, et.al. – is meant to be social. Participating, usually at no charge to the user, carries implied consent to the owner for monetizing that service. As with television programs and free newspapers, users pay little attention to business practices they rarely see. That social media attracts young people and can be easily used by the unscrupulous raises questions about the manner in which these portals are deployed. From bank account information to the name of your cat, data in the digital reality is indiscriminate. It’s all “1’s” and “0’s”. 

That social media is under deep examination recalls one interpretation of physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: (paraphrased) the act of looking at something changes it. Canadian regulators opened in investigation of Facebook’s privacy policies. Something will change.

Commissioner Reding’s remarks also addressed privacy issues associated with online behavioral advertising placement, airport security scanners and RFID tags. The Commission has moved to the second stage of infringement proceedings against the UK government for failure to amend data privacy laws. 

Private information is, as Zuckerberg admitted, a "core component of the products and features we build every day.” Privacy rules, the Web 2.0 people seem to believe, are so last century. “All these concerns about privacy tend to be old people issues,” offered social networking portal Linkedin founder Reid Hoffmann at the World Economic Forum in Davos (January 28). Bankers think similarly about all rules.

Both Mark Zuckerberg and Commissioner Reding are correct, privacy is about you. Data mining – not all that unlike any extraction business – makes fortunes. Buyers line-up for targeted information about individuals. EU rules state clearly that you own information about you. Anybody wanting it must ask first.

“For me,” said Commissioner Reding, “it is clear that without the prior informed consent of citizens their data cannot be used.”

Perhaps this is another concept the Web 2.0 people just don’t get.

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