Social network sites violate users’ privacy

User terms at major social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are highly questionable, according to a survey by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

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Please raise your hand if you took the time to read all 11 pages of Facebook’s user terms!

No? You didn’t read them? How irresponsible of you!

What about the 14 pages from LinkedIn? You didn’t read those either?

Shame on you!

Norway’s Consumer Council did read them, though.

They actually did it together with researchers from Sintef as part of a study on social media. After having done so, they were very worried about violations of basic consumer rights.

Read more about the study here.

After having studied the user terms the researches made this summary:

A lot of red crosses, as you can see.
A short explanation for non-Norwegian readers: Nettby is a local social network site which is particularly popular among Norwegian teenagers. It is run by the newspaper VG, which is one of the most visited news sites in the world. Origo is a social network run by A-pressen, a chain of local newspapers.

A couple of conclusions from the Norwegian Consumer Council:

• Users typically give up their rights to personal information.
• User terms are normally designed in a way to make it impossible for users to understand the scope of what they accept.
• It is complicated to change the privacy settings
• User terms can be changed unilaterally by the site without your prior consent

The Consumer Council argues that interest groups need to work to protect the consumers’ privacy online.

I blog about this survey as I think it might be of interest for social network users outside Norway as well. The Norwegian Consumer Council has been very active in defending consumer rights on the web. A few years back it gained international attention when it launche a fight against how Apple failed to make its iTunes store compatible with other music players than iPod. A couple of weeks ago the council launched a similar attack on Amazon’s user terms for Kindle, claiming they violated basic consumer rights.

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1. - Kindle’s user terms violate basic consumer rights
2. Social networks attract three quarters of European web users
3. The top 5 most popular posts of the year
4. Three-year-trend: Newspaper sites falling, social media rising

Tagged as: community, Facebook, Myspace, social media, Twitter