Canadians Forces Facebook to tighten the privacy rules

This should be how a Law should function… For the people…

After a year-long review from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Facebook has agreed to give users more information about how it uses their data for advertising, and to change the default settings of its privacy controls – which many users leave unaltered – to better reflect users’ preferences.

The move, which comes in response to complaints from Canadian privacy officials,will clamp down the use of personal data by social networking sites and the software developers who use them to distribute their applications.

By giving more power to the consumers over their information, the move will increase online consumer protection by disallowing the Facebook to sell the sensitive information to their advertisers. This will also restrict the makers of the games and quizzes to post all contents in the  profile pages.

“Application developers have had virtually unrestricted access to Facebook users’ personal information,” privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart told. “The changes Facebook plans to introduce will allow users to control the types of personal information that applications can access.”

The changes, which Facebook will introduce over the next year, will affect all 250 million Facebook users worldwide.

This move could have repercussions for other sites such as MySpace and Twitter.