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back to article Facebook spurns privacy probe as 'routine audit'

Facebook's international headquarters are in Dublin, Ireland, where the company just so happens to face a regulatory probe into the handling of personal data on the social network. According to the RTE, the Irish data protection commissioner will carry out a privacy audit of the site in November. That's potentially a big deal …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Might be a little less "routine" than Facebook are letting on

    The Irish Data Protection Commission are taking quite a hard line at the moment; they've been making a lot of noise in the Irish market for the last 18 months or so, got quite a few people nervous, especially on the ad side of things.

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  2. Forget It
    Alert

    Google Data Centre Jobs

    Could this be connected, in any way, with the fact that:

    Google is to invest €75m (£65m) in a new 11-acre data centre in Dublin, creating 230 jobs.

    as reported by the BBC here:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/30/new-google-data-centre-dublin/print

    ?

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And then there is this:

    "Abstract : n one embodiment, a method is described for tracking information about the activities of users of a social networking system while on another domain. The method includes maintaining a profile for each of one or more users of the social networking system, each profile identifying a connection to one or more other users of the social networking system and including information about the user. The method additionally includes receiving one or more communications from a third-party website having a different domain than the social network system, each message communicating an action taken by a user of the social networking system on the third-party website. The method additionally includes logging the actions taken on the third-party website in the social networking system, each logged action including information about the action. The method further includes correlating the logged actions with one or more advertisements presented to the one or more users on the third-party website as well as correlating the logged actions with a user of the social networking system. "

    http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=20110231240.PGNR.&OS=dn/20110231240&RS=DN/20110231240

    Which suggests that the cookie incident wasn't an accident at all.

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  4. dssf

    Fight this bullshit

    The BEST way to fight this bullshit is to simply not order online, not to fill out surveys online, and not to follow links directly from or to fb or fb-affiliating sites. Re-enter the URL via google. Strip the meta code by first pasting to a dumb text editor, then pasting it into the browser. Hopefully, all that'll be left is temporal information, but not the real clickthroughs themselves. If you thnk that that won't work, then when buying something, research online, then buy later, like days or weeks later, outside of your own zip or postal code, and don't use any coupons or special offer codes if you can live without the enticement.

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