VIENNA – Max Schrems wasn't sure what he would get when he asked Facebook to send him a record of his personal data from three years of using the site.
What the 24-year-old Austrian law student didn't expect, though, was 1,222 pages of data on a CD. It included chats he had deleted more than a year ago, "pokes" dating back to 2008, invitations to which he had never responded, let alone attended, and hundreds of other details.
Time for an "aha" moment.
In response, Schrems has launched an online campaign aimed at forcing the social media behemoth that has 800 million users to abide by European data privacy laws — something the Palo Alto, California-based company insists it already does.
Yet since Schrems launched his "Europe vs. Facebook" website in August, Facebook has increasingly been making overtures not only to Schrems, but to other Europeans concerned about data privacy, including Germany's data security watchdogs.
"Have we done enough in the past to deal with you? No," Facebook's director of European public policy, Richard Allan, testified Tuesday before a German parliamentary committee on new media. "Will we do more now? Yes."
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