Permission marketing experts Rosemary Smith and Jenny Moseley discuss whether Facebook might be losing face.

Facebook is heading for a serious challenge to its user-generated content from data protection authorities in Switzerland and Germany. This comes just weeks after three Google executives were sentenced to six months in jail by an Italian court for ‘permitting’ a video showing the bullying of an autistic teenager to be posted on You Tube.

The authorities have taken issue with Facebook’s policy of allowing users to post personal data, including email addresses and photographs, of non-Facebook users without specific consent from the featured individuals.

On inspection, the Facebook Guide to Privacy encourages users to give their posts a wide circulation: ‘We recommend Everyone be able to see information that will make it easier for friends to find, identify and learn about you. This includes basic information like your About Me description, Family and Relationships, Work and Education Info, and Website, as well as posts that you create, like photo albums and status updates.’ Facebook currently relies on the understanding that those posting the information will obtain consent from their friends but Swiss data protection law would require explicit consent.

While this may sound ‘cuckoo’ to the free marketers out there, the actions against Facebook and Google represent a challenge based on a fundamental (if inconvenient) premise of European data protection law – it’s the individual and nobody else who owns personal data and can consent to its use.

Making the choice

This magazine has debated before whether the ‘nanny’ state should spoil the party for Facebook. After all, the (predominantly) young user base of most social networking sites couldn’t care less. Privacy activists would argue this is due to credulity rather than informed choice.

Facebook effectively makes the choice for users by providing default settings which favour their business model. To be fair, the full Facebook Privacy Policy (all ten pages of it) encourages users to manage their privacy settings and clearly spells out what will happen if they accept the defaults. But remember, if I’m not a user I won’t have seen the policy.

Facebook wouldn’t be the first to bury bad news in the small print and they are no strangers to privacy controversy. A successful US law suit forced them to retract their Beacon web tracking facility, and the current privacy policy (only four months old) caused howls because it pushed the new (and more revealing) default settings to users in a handy pop-up.

Whichever way you face on this one, there’s a good chance that more informed consent requirements will be part of the online world in the future; just how that will affect marketing in a social networking context remains to be seen.

Rosemary Smith and Jenny Moseley are co-directors of Opt-4. Visit their website.