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<b><i>Online Extra:</b></i> The Anti-Social Network

By Michael D. Goldhaber
January 26, 2016

In 2011, a 23-year-old student of data privacy law wondered how private his data was. Max ?Schrems of the University of Vienna asked Facebook for everything they had on him. Schrems sent two emails and got no response. A letter. No response. A phone call. No response. Then, as his lawyer, Wolfram Proksch of PFR in Austria, tells the story, ?Schrems received a mystery package in the mail with the data he had requested, perhaps from a secret privacy sympathizer at Facebook.

In Schrems' two-and-a-half years of moderate Facebook use, the company had collected enough information on the Austrian law student to fill a 1,222-page printout with details on his religious, political, sexual, and above all commercial proclivities.

Max Schrems raised $50,000 through crowdfunding (on Facebook, of course), and filed 22 grievances with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. (Because Facebook's global servers sit near Dublin, the Irish agency protects all 1.2 billion Facebook users outside the U.S. and Canada.) Among other things, Schrems argued that Facebook violates EU privacy by collecting more data than needed, without informed consent, and disclosing it to third parties. The Irish regulators yawned.

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