Facebook faces fines and audits in Ireland

PEOPLE CATALOGUE Facebook could get a fine of €100,000 from the Irish data protection commissioner because it insists on holding on to personal data that its users have deleted.

Austrian law student Max Schrems is the root of the problem, for Facebook at least, as he had requested the 1,200 pages of personal data it keeps about him and began reading it.

Schrems discovered that the social network was keeping information about him that he had deleted, according to the Guardian. Having received and filtered the documents he lodged 22 complaints with the Irish data protection commissioner. Ireland, you see, is where Facebook has its European base.

A spokeswoman for the commissioner's office told the Guardian that it would investigate Schrems' complaints and the alleged breaches he raised with it. The paper adds that the maximum fine that it can levy against the company is €100,000.

Schrem found that the web site was keeping a large amount of information about him, including when people had rejected his friend requests and when he had defriended someone himself. Most scary, perhaps, is the fact that Facebook kept a log of every chat he had. Somehow that does not surprise us.

"I discovered Facebook had kept highly personal messages I had written and then deleted, which, were they to become public, could be highly damaging to my reputation," said Schrems.

"I'm not saying there was anything criminal or forbidden there, but let's just say that, as someone wanting to work in law, there was stuff which could make it pretty impossible for me to get a job. Information is power, and information about people is power over people. It's frightening that all this data is being held by Facebook."

Although it sounds like personal data, it is not, according to Facebook. "This is clearly not personal data, and Irish data protection law rightly places some valuable and reasonable limits on the data that has to be provided," said the company, before adding that anyone can download their personal archive.

Shram is behind the Europe vs Facebook web site that was set up to encourage other users to make such requests to the social network. However there he has suggested that the data that the firm is handing out is just a part of what it actually holds.

"We are in continuous contact with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC)," he wrote earlier this week. "The Irish authority already clearly stated that access to further data has to be granted by Facebook. Facebook now did the exact opposite." µ