Facebook forces privacy review

One of the internet’s largest social networking sites, Facebook, of which over 7.7 million Australians visit every month, is forcing all of their users to review their privacy settings.

The forced review is in the wake of a number of events that have called into question what Facebook intends to do with all of their users account data; the major incident causing this being an investigation by the Canadian Government’s Privacy commission.

The inquiry by the privacy commission resulted in several privacy violations; mostly to do with application developers’ "virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users' personal information."

According to Facebook, the features of the site that are set to see changes will be the explanations that users get as to why Facebook needs their information – for example, there’s no information given as to why the website needs to know your date of birth.

Applications will also be effected by these changes, instead of the simple “Allow” or “Cancel” choices you get when installing an application; there will be more detailed information that will specify exactly what information of yours the application will be accessing – and why.

The Canadian Privacy commission is happy with the proposed changes, and says that it will help protect Facebook user’s privacy globally. Facebook has said that the planned changes are to happen immediately, but won’t be completed for about a year.