Fifteen privacy and consumer organisations, including the Consumer Federation of America and the US Public Interest Research Group, have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission regarding social networking site Facebook.
The groups say Facebook is continuing to abuse the privacy of its users by manipulating certain settings.
“Facebook continues to manipulate the settings of users and its own privacy policy so that it can take personal information provided by users for a limited purpose and make it widely available for a commercial purpose,” said the complaint letter.
“In fact, this complaint also speaks to a growing concern about the ability of the FTC to protect American consumers as new business practices emerge.”
Additionally, the group also claims that changes to user profile information without consent “violates user expectations, diminishes user privacy and contradicts Facebook’s own representations”.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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