Facebook holds meetings with staff over privacy concerns
FACEBOOK chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and other executives will meet with employees to discuss privacy practices of the world’s largest social networking website, as criticism grows about the way it treats its 400m users’ personal information.
Facebook will not make any announcements about privacy changes at the meeting, said a source familiar with the situation yesterday.
The meeting comes a few weeks after Facebook unveiled a variety of new features designed to make its service integrate more easily into other websites.
Some of the changes, including a so-called “instant personalisation” feature that automatically imports Facebook users’ personal profile information into the music site Pandora and the user-review site Yelp, have provoked sharp criticism among privacy advocates.
Earlier this month, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre and a coalition of 14 other advocacy groups filed a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission blasting Facebook for disclosing user information to third-parties without the prior consent of users.
Several US senators have also recently expressed concern about Facebook’s privacy practices.