Facebook: Your Personal Data is a Trade Secret

An anonymous reader writes "An Austrian group called Europe versus Facebook has so far made 22 complaints regarding the social network's practices. In the process, the organization has stumbled upon an important tidbit: Facebook says it is not required to give you a copy of some of your personal data if it deems doing so would adversely affect its trade secrets or intellectual property."

Re:Interesting

[iluvcapra]

It might even be more fun than that. Maybe they know things about you that you never told them, like your gender or age. I would also tend to believe that if they're able to figure out this information about people they're probably entitled to keep the fact of their knowing secret.

Re:Shock Horror

[Cryacin]

Keep on drinking the Kool-Aid then chum. It starts with the anonymous herd, and ends with the individual when they become interesting. How much do you think your soon to be ex-wife's divorce lawyer would like to pay to get you fully profiled and sniff out any dirt on you? Of course it can be done via conventional means, it's just much quicker and more efficient online.

Re:Interesting

[PopeRatzo]

. A coworker today was wondering why Facebook recommended as a friend a person that we recognise the name of from within our company, but in an overseas branch.

I've got a better one: A colleague who has a facebook account but has never posted anything, not a photo, not even information in the profile got a recommendation from Facebook to add as a friend someone who is in her cancer survivor's group. The absolutely only bit of information about her that she's been able to find on Facebook is a photograph from a different friend's profile in which she appears but is not named in the photo's info. As I said, she has never posted anything about herself and the person who was recommended to her is not the facebook friend of a facebook friend.

Wrap your head around that one. Now maybe there's some bit of data she forgot about or some connection she has been unable to learn, but she's really a detail-oriented person and has just not been able to determine how this connection was made.

Either way, it's creepy as hell and she deleted her account, although she has no misconceptions that anything collected about her has been deleted. I guess you would say she "closed" her account because it does not appear that Facebook ever willingly relents a scrap of info.

My suggestion? Back out slowly, don't try to delete your account. Change your name, get facial reconstruction and move far away.

I never really liked it much, but I just won't touch that shit any more. I hate to sound like an eccentric old crank but I've been writing letters a lot more lately. I don't even let my eyes linger on the Facebook icon on any webpages I read.