Is Facebook Violating The Law Just By Encouraging You To Share?

While we know that Facebook collects a ton of data on people, and we absolutely agree that the way it implemented some of its frictionless sharing is ridiculously unclear, does that mean it should be illegal? The privacy group EPIC, who has such a low opinion of all of human kind that it feels that only it should decide whether or not you can share your own info, is asking the feds to ban Facebook’s frictionless sharing — even though it’s entirely optional.

Again, we agree that the implementation is poor, but EPIC takes this to a whole different, and absolutely ridiculous level, suggesting that merely encouraging people to choose to share info is a violation of their privacy:


Encouraging or prompting users to share personal information is detrimental to consumer privacy

Wait, what? That makes no sense. I would agree that tricking people into sharing personal info is detrimental, but merely providing services and encouraging people to share info they want to share? How is that possibly detrimental? It’s only deterimental in the eyes of organizations like EPIC, who think that they need to block people who want to share from doing so.

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