Sen. Franken and three of his colleagues sent a letter to Facebook today deriding the site for increasingly making personal data available to third-party companies.
Specifically, the senators expressed concern over recent changes to Facebook that potentially comprimise people's profile information.
Brace yourself, this gets a bit complicated.
First, there is the new "connections" feature, which has yet to be rolled out. Rather than users merely listing favorite movies, for example, profiles will now display links to specific pages. (One might link to hotdish, let's say). Creating this "connection" -- which is involuntary -- makes some of that user's info publicly available.
The senators also pointed to a new feature that uses Facebook info to personalize visits to outside websites, called "instant personalization." Users can opt-out of this, but the lawmakers argued that most people will not know to do so.
"Providing opt-in mechanisms for information sharing instead of expecting users to go through long and complicated opt-out processes is a critical step towards maintaining clarity and transparency," wrote Franken, along with Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York, Michael Bennet of Colorado and Mark Begich of Alaska.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes had this response to the letter:
"We appreciate the concerns raised by Sen. Schumer and expect that further dialogue with interested members of Congress about the user controls that accompany the tools announced by Facebook last week will alleviate any concerns they may have."
