Facebook and Germany Compromise on User Privacy

Facebook has reached an agreement with German privacy regulators over the use of Friend Finder, a tool which enables users to send the people in their email address books invitations to join Facebook. The move has been heavily criticized in privacy-conscious Germany and Facebook was asked to amend its practices.

Facebook has now agreed to implement several changes to the way Friend Finder works which the authorities deemed sufficient.

The authorities criticized Facebook after receiving many complaints from non-Facebook users which kept receiving unsolicited invitations from their email contacts.

The Friend Finder tool is designed to enable users to invite their friends and other email contacts to join Facebook. Users provide their credentials to various email and instant messaging services and their contacts are imported by Facebook.

Users can then choose to invite their contacts. This is not done automatically, but the default action is to send invitations to all the contacts.

The imported contact data is also used to suggest friends that are already on Facebook.

Facebook has agreed to make it clearer for users what they are doing and to suggest that they only send invitations to the people they actually know and think they may want to receive them.

Another change may be to not select all contacts by default and to enable the users choose the ones they want to invite.

Facebook and the German authorities have been in talks for the past seven months. Initially, privacy regulators wanted Facebook to remove Friend Finder altogether, but the two sides have reached a compromise.

German data privacy authorities have had a long scuttle with Google over several issues. A request from the German officials resulted in the discovery of the public WiFi data collection in Street View cars.

Germany is also the only country where Google agreed to enable users to have their houses removed from Street View before the service went live there.