>You chose to use the Facebook service, you chose to provide this information to them, and you chose to agree to their terms of service. Please, educate me, because I really don't get it.
This isn't right for two reasons:
1. Under EU law there are certain rights that you can not sign away in a contract. They are yours and you keep them no matter what any bit of paper or click-through license says. This might seem disingenuous, signing to say you'll give them something but not doing so, but the law is actually the other way around: they should not be asking you to sign that right away in the first place.
2. It would seem that facebook are not only tracking people who sign-up. See http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-is-b... (or search for "facebook shadow profiles"). This is most definitely against the data protection act in the UK, and they haven't even asked those people to sign away the right to not have that data stored unnecessarily.
This isn't right for two reasons:
1. Under EU law there are certain rights that you can not sign away in a contract. They are yours and you keep them no matter what any bit of paper or click-through license says. This might seem disingenuous, signing to say you'll give them something but not doing so, but the law is actually the other way around: they should not be asking you to sign that right away in the first place.
2. It would seem that facebook are not only tracking people who sign-up. See http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-is-b... (or search for "facebook shadow profiles"). This is most definitely against the data protection act in the UK, and they haven't even asked those people to sign away the right to not have that data stored unnecessarily.