Facebook to Tighten Privacy After Canadian Investigation

IDG News Service — Facebook will enhance its social-networking site's privacy features over the next 12 months as a result of a set of recommendations from the Canadian government.

Facebook will increase the information it provides to its users about its privacy features, as well as make technical changes to tighten privacy controls, the company said Thursday.

The changes come as a direct result of a review of Facebook's privacy policies and controls conducted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Facebook cooperated with the Canadian agency's study, which lasted more than a year.

Specifically, Facebook will update its privacy policy so that it more clearly explains its privacy practices. Facebook will also reach out to users, prompting them to review their privacy settings.

For the tens of thousands of third-party applications built for the Facebook platform, Facebook will begin to require that they comply with a new set of permissions, specifying the types of information they want to access. "Express consent" from end users will also be required before their data and their friends' data is made available to external applications.

In a separate statement issued by her office, Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart said the changes to privacy policies and practices that Facebook has agreed to make will bring it into compliance with Canadian law.

"We're very pleased Facebook has been responsive to our recommendations," she said in the statement.

The Canadian agency's biggest concern has been what it called application developers' "virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information."

The new privacy requirements for third-party applications will take about a year to implement because they involve changes to the Facebook platform's API (application programming interface) and to the applications themselves. It will be interesting to see how Facebook developers react to the news that they will have to re-tool their applications to comply with these stricter privacy controls.

In a blog posting for its developer community, Facebook official Ethan Beard didn't sugar-coat the implications of the changes to the API.

"We have committed to making these enhancements over the next twelve months, and anticipate a lengthy beta period including opportunities for you to provide input, multiple blog posts, and updated documentation delivered well ahead of time. Understanding that this will likely require modifications to your code base, we want to give you the earliest heads up that these enhancements are on our road map," Beard wrote.

Ultimately, the goal is to make Facebook members better informed about how applications use their data, and to give them more control. "This should result in better informed users who are more eager to engage with applications on Facebook," he wrote.

In July, Facebook announced plans to simplify its privacy features, saying that they have become too numerous and complicated for end users to understand and apply.

Under pressure from Twitter, Facebook is also in the process of adding less restrictive privacy settings for end users who want to make their profiles, or at least portions of it, more public and thus more widely available to others on and off Facebook.