Facebook policy chief admits site needs to improve deletion toolsfor a minority of users

Facebook’s European director of policy has admitted that the site
needs to improve its tools to help those “exceptional” users who
need to delete data posted on the site forever.
Richard Allan, talking at a Westminster Media Forum debate
entitled, ‘Social media, online privacy and the ‘right to be
forgotten’', said that the majority of Facebook’s 500 million users
around the world were more concerned that their data, such as
photos and videos, remained on the service rather than being
deleted.
Allan, who was en route to Brussels to take part in continued
discussions on the European Union ’s plans to force social
networks to completely erase personal data, said that it would be
a mistake to amend data protection laws on the basis of a few
exceptional cases.
He said that “hard cases make bad law” and that the majority of
the people using Facebook want a guarantee that their data will
stay on the service, rather run the risk of any of it being deleted.
However, he did admit that the site still needed to “find
mechanisms to help in exceptional cases” where data needed to
be deleted.
Allan used young people who needed to delete their “youthful
expressions” from Facebook when they are older, in order to not
have embarrassing comments used against them in job
interviews or in any other walk of life – to illustrate what he
meant by exceptional cases.
He was at pains to stress that people can delete anything from
Facebook and it will clear from the site ’s environment. However,
in cases where information has been posted to ‘everyone’ online
and indexed by search engines, or private information has then
been posted publicly by someone else on the service, Facebook
was not responsible.
When asked why Facebook had indexed its members ‘public’
information in Google in the first place, Allan said that users had
wanted the service to do so in order to push other links they
didn ’t like about themselves down the search engine list.
Earlier this year Facebook was forced to disable a new feature
which allowed third party companies access to people’s personal
contact details, after negative user feedback and warnings from
security experts.
And last year Facebook was forced to simplify its privacy settings
in response to international criticism of the site’s increasingly
complex systems for users to decide what aspects of their data is
available online.
Speaking on the same panel as Facebook's Allan was Dr Chris
Pounder, director of Amberhawk - a legal information training
service. He argued that despite social network ’s privacy settings,
anyone posting anything online needed to accept that as soon as
they published the information, it was no longer private.
“As soon as you publish anything online, it is no longer personal…
this is a publishing issue and not a privacy one…We must
understand that we are not dealing with privacy [issues] we are
dealing with data protection. ”