Do YOU Understand Your Social Networking Site's Privacy Policy?

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November 16, 2007

Do YOU Understand Your Social Networking Site's Privacy Policy?

Valleywag has an entry on a gun owner who claims "her bosses asked Facebook for permission to see her profile -- which is normally set to private for everyone but her friends -- through something called Administrators Access."

The gun owner's original forum post is sort of hard to parse, but here's the part involving Facebook:

"My employer [...] is using its insurance company to pay for 'profiles' on facebook of people who are employed by my corporation."

I'm assuming that means the insurance company is collecting profiles of employees of this company who use Facebook.

That's interesting, I suppose.

The employee posts a fragment of Facebook's privacy policy to establish that what they did wasn't right. Which caused me to re-read the same policy:

"We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."

Quick: Which laws in your state or city might be applied to getting Facebook to expose all the information in your profile? I don't know, either. It's all broad enough to be meaningless, especially when you throw in the part about Facebook protecting its interests, which could be construed to include "avoiding even frivolous litigation from an insurance company claiming it's investigating employee fraud."

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