In one of those rare bipartisan collaborations (especially these days), Congressmen Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) and Joe Barton (R-Texas) have called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Facebook for its violation of users’ privacy.
“When users log out of Facebook,” they wrote, “they are under the expectation that Facebook is no longer monitoring their activities. We believe this impression should be the reality.”
Their letter comes in the wake of a posting by Australian blogger Nik Cubrilovic, who claims that Facebook continues to follow its users even after they log out of the website. Cubrilovic contends that he brought the problem to Facebook’s attention in November 2010 and again in January 2011, but that he received no official response until he went public with his contentions. Even then, the response came from a Facebook engineer named Gregg Stefancik, who wrote that Facebook has “no interest in tracking people.”
The Congressmen will have the support of a coalition of privacy, consumer, and civil liberties groups across the United States, who share similar concerns about Facebook’s practices. These include the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Consumer Action, the American Library Association, and the Center for Digital Democracy among others.
In a letter to the FTC these groups called for an investigation into “whether the changes recently announced by Facebook are consistent with the policies and representations that were in place when consumers provided their personal information to Facebook or whether they constitute unfair and deceptive trade practices, in violation of consumer protection law in the United States.”
Halloween Guide 2011 
