Friday, October 29, 2010

Apparently Facebook hates privacy so much that they pay lobbyists to stop privacy laws

This maybe shouldn't surprise anyone, but Mashable is reporting that Facebook Lobbied to Kill Social Networking Privacy Act in the USA.

It's one thing to believe that privacy isn't important, or to make mistakes that expose users, but paying people to lobby against privacy legislation that might protect your users seems like a big step further. It makes me concerned as a user of the service.

Incidentally, Facebook has already broken Canadian privacy law (they're not the only ones), and likely the laws of several other countries, so I guess it makes sense that they wouldn't want to run afoul of further laws... but I really wish they'd do this by handling privacy issues better rather than paying people to make sure the laws don't come into effect. Maybe the law was simply ill-conceived (I haven't read it) but this really doesn't sound like the actions of a socially-responsible company. Very disappointing.

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