Facebook Rebuffs Critics’ Six Point Plan

Priivacy groups campaigning about Facebookmar’s attitude to its users’ information have stepped up the pressure, but the company has refuted six-point plan proposed by the campaigners.

In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (PDF), privacy advocates released a six-point plan for the social network to give users more control over the sharing of their information.

Facebook rejects plans

For the moment, Facebook does not appear to be budging, wth founder Mark Zuckerberg defending the company and calling for balance but said it was open to continuing a dialogue about privacy. Zuckerberg has faced prolonged criticism for many months over an explicit attitude that privacy norms have changed.

Facebook received widespread praise from users around the world and the privacy community last month for introducing simpler and more powerful controls for sharing personal information,” Facebook spokesperson Andrew Noyes told eWEEK. “We plan to continue to make control easy and effective for all the people who use our service and will continue to engage these groups and others in a constructive dialogue about these important issues.”

In the letter, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California and several other groups acknowledged Facebook’s recent improvements, but contended that additional steps are needed to “demonstrate [Facebook’s] commitment to the principle of giving users control over how and with whom they share.”

Chief among the concerns aired in the letter was what the groups called the “app gap,” which the letter said needs to be addressed by “empowering users to decide exactly which applications can access their personal information.”

Expanding on this term, the letter said, “Facebook’s latest changes allow users a ‘nuclear option’ to opt out of applications entirely. While this is an important setting, it is not adequate for meaningful control. Facebook users should also have the option to choose to share information only with specific applications.”

Point-by-point response

In a point-by-point response to the groups’ letter, Noyes countered that a plan for a new data permission model was announced in summer 2009, and “the product is scheduled to launch to all developers in the coming weeks.”

The groups also asked Facebook to, “Make ‘instant personalisation’ opt-in by default.” The feature was at the centre of the firestorm of controversy a few weeks ago, as concerns were raised regarding user information being shared withthird-party sites.