14 DAY TRIAL // Members of the Dutch Parliament have asked the country's security and justice minister to investigate whether the LinkedIn's new social ads feature violates data protection legislation.
LinkedIn just rolled out a new system that uses people's names and pictures in ads displayed to others in their network. This is called social advertising and has been turned on for everyone by default.
"LinkedIn may sometimes pair an advertiser's message with social content from LinkedIn's network in order to make the ad more relevant," the company explains.
Even though the new feature has been announced in advanced and has undergone beta testing, the fact that the company chose to make it opt-out by default has generated many negative reactions.
"LinkedIn have added these new features and opted all their 120 million users in without any form of notification, even though in my profile at least the option to get feature update mails was ticked (another default)," says Trend Micro's Director of Security Research & Communication Rik Ferguson.
"I called the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK and they confirmed that this would be a breach of the Data Protection Act if the data were stored or processed in the UK," he adds.
The company has offices in London, UK, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which means that it must respect EU and national data protection regulations in both of those countries.
According to NU.NL [Google translation], Dutch MPs Martijn van Dam and Jeroen Recourt sent a letter to Security and Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten asking him to investigate if LinkedIn has violated the data protection legislation when it introduced this feature.
"Do you agree that the use of personal data in this manner by LinkedIn or any other social networking service is undesirable and that explicit permission should be given by users? If yes, how do you intend to make sure that this practice is stopped? If not, why not?" they write. [approximate translation]
Meanwhile, LinkedIn announced on its blog that it will change the feature to no longer show pictures and names in ads directly. Instead people will see things like "x people in your network follow [company]" and they will be able to click on a link to see which users exactly.
Users who want to opt out of this feature entirely can do so by going to their account settings, clicking on "Account" and unchecking the box under "Manage Social Advertising." Update August 12, 2011: Corrected an error to reflect that LinkedIn has an office in London. The original version incorrectly stated that the company does not operate in the UK.