‘Facebook, Google manipulating users’

Facebook and Google are pushing users to share private information by offering “invasive” and limited default options despite new EU data protection laws aimed at giving users more control and choice, a government study said yesterday.

The Norwegian Consumer Council found that the US tech giants’ privacy updates clash with the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which forces companies to clarify what choices people have when sharing private information.

“These companies manipulate us into sharing information about ourselves,” the council’s director of digital services, Finn Myrstad, said in a statement. “(This) is at odds with the expectations of consumers and the intention of the new Regulation,” the 2018 study, entitled “Deceived By Design”, concluded.

 Myrstad said the practices showed “a lack of respect for their users, and are circumventing the notion of giving consumers control of their personal data”.

The case for the new laws has been boosted by the recent scandal over the harvesting of Facebook users’ data by British consultancy Cambridge Analytica for the 2016 US presidential election.

Information for the report was collected from mid-April to early June, a few weeks after the EU rules came into force.

The report exposed that Facebook and Google often set the least privacy-friendly option as a default and that users rarely change pre-selected settings.