Student privacy activists due to meet with Facebook
Austrian student activists say they expect to meet Facebook representatives in Vienna next Monday in an attempt to resolve their disagreements over the social-networking site's privacy policies.
The student group Europe v. Facebook filed complaints about Facebook with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) in August and September last year. Coincidentally, the privacy regulator was already planning an audit of Facebook's privacy policy when it received the complaints.
Its audit report, released in December, made more than a dozen recommendations about how Facebook could improve privacy protections and data handling. The regulator said if the company complied with its recommendations it is unlikely it would be violating Irish and European privacy laws. Facebook agreed to many of the recommendations. But Europe v. Facebook thinks the company hasn't gone far enough, and Ireland's regulator has been too soft, said Max Schrems, a law student at the University of Vienna.
