Ireland is catching up with the UK and surrounding areas of Europe in its percentage of active Facebook users. Nearly half of the country’s entire population now sport a Facebook profile and make regular status updates, and most of them are 25 to 34 years of age. That’s good news for the emerald isle, which formerly lagged behind other European countries in social networking. Yet, Ireland’s Privacy Commissioner Billy Hawkes has asked the most popular social network to give users more control over personal information that is shared on Facebook, including who can access that information about a user.
Commissioner Hawkes is foremost concerned about the ways in which third-party applications that run on Facebook use information. He has called on Facebook to be completely transparent with users on this matter, and also wants Facebook to give users control over the removal of any personal information from the social network and all related databases at will. Good luck, Mr. Hawkes! We’d all like that.
