By David Ponce
Privacy laws in Europe are a little tougher than in North America, and if you request that Facebook send you everything it has ever logged of your activity on the site… it has no choice but to comply. That’s exactly what 24-year-old Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria did. And sure enough, he received a CD in the mail containing 1,222 PDF documents listing in excruciating detail just what he’d been doing on the site since he joined. While we’ve known for some time that this was going on, it’s interesting to see just how much data is actually collected.
Collected together were records of when Schrems logged in and out of the social network, the times and content of sent and received messages and an accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded. The archive captured friend requests, former or alternative names and email addresses, employment and relationship statuses and photos, in some cases with their GPS locations included, to name a few.
As we said this practice is nothing new, and maybe Zuckerberg was onto something when he declared last year that the age of privacy was over. Yet there is this feeling that there isn’t enough transparency and education with regards to just how much of our lives are leaving digital footprints, and just how exposed we truly are. Maybe privacy is dying, but it would be nice if it did with our informed consent.
