Leaked Facebook law enforcement guides not new, already available
Several news outlets yesterday reported – including Public Intelligence, TPM, and ZDNet – that Anonymous and LulzSec hackers, working as part of Operation AntiSec, had leaked Facebook law enforcement guidelines. The trouble is, while they were indeed leaked, they are not new: Facebook has previously released them and they have been made publicly available at various places on the Internet.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said it best on Twitter: "Anon 'leaks' Facebook's 2010 law enforcement guidelines, which have been available on the EFF website since Jan: https://eff.org/r.H7t #foia." Furthermore, not only were the guidelines previously available, but they are already out of date.
Still, the new coverage about how Facebook provides user information when it is obligated to by law only further increases fears about data privacy. This is exactly why the social networking giant has been making its guidelines public.
In fact, Facebook has just published a new webpage titled "Information for Law Enforcement Authorities" to its Safety Center. Most of the information was already available in the guidelines, but now everything users could be worried about in regards to this topic is available on one webpage for easy access.
By making this information publicly available, Facebook wants to, once again, show it has nothing to hide. It's not clear if the social networking giant was planning to publish this new webpage all along or if it did so in response to this supposed "leak."
See also:
- Senate to hold hearing on Facebook tracking cookies
- Congresswoman to probe Facebook over coordinated spam attack
- Zuckerberg: Google, Microsoft collect data "behind your back"
- Facebook sued for violating wiretap laws with tracking cookies
- Privacy groups ask FTC for Facebook investigation too and US congressmen ask FTC to investigate Facebook cookies
- Irish Data Protection Commissioner to begin Facebook audit