'The door isn't quite shut yet,' Yair Cohen speaks with RT news about the recent EU ruling on right to be forgotten not to be extended worldwide.
The EU courts have said that currently, there wasn't any obligation for search engine operators to grant a request for de-listing on all of its versions across the world but it doesn't mean it won't ever be possible to be granted the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten globally.
Facebook's new privacy feature 'Off-Facebook Activity', we are being told, is meant to allow users to turn off some or have all of their browsing; online shopping and other activities removed from their history from now onwards.
Facebook collects data about its users' activities in order to gather information to target advertising to their users, of course, to profit through the sales of advertising and sales of data to third parties, including advertisers.
Even with this new feature, after you have disconnected the apps and turned off your browsing, Facebook will continue to collect your data, without it being linked
to your account, so Facebook will still benefit from your data which is
collected outside your Facebook activities.The only difference is that it will not be allowed to use
that particular data to target you with personalised ads.
If Facebook are so keen on 'giving people control over their data', it begs the questions of why the new tool will be hidden under one of the sub-menus, making it hard to access and also, why it will take 48 hours to implement, after you have requested to use the removal tool.
It is also unclear
how much detail Facebook is going to provide you about the nature of the data that
is being passed on to it via the third party websites and apps.The information
is expected to be very limited to the name of the website and the country of
its origin.
It is astonishing how much information Facebook has about their users. You only to have to visit a site for a nanosecond or be redirected briefly to a site accidentally and those sites hold your data that is sent back to Facebook.
Working on this new feature over 12 months ago, Facebook referred to it as a 'clear history' tool, much like a web browser, where history can be deleted entirely. This new tool does not do that. It just severs identifying information.
It seems that there
is no way out of Facebook still benefiting from using your data, even if you
are able to find the Off-Facebook feature under the sub-menu to use it.
Last year Security Services in the United States told Yahoo
it had to create and install a backdoor system to its email operations system
so that it will be made easier for the state to spy on users’ data when spying becomes a necessity.
Both the US government and Yahoo were criticised at the time but a
year on, the UK government is about to pass a law which will require all telecommunication to build into any service they develop, a backdoor entry for the government.
This sounds bad but it might, after all, not be such a bad idea because at least, when data spying is being governed by law, this allows to create checks and balances on a far more transparent basis than currently exists.
