The Shadow Profiles of Ireland

Big events seem to come in threes. Whether it be the deaths of famous people or breakthroughs in technology, the trend has continued throughout history, and now it has arrived in the technology industry. With the death of Steve jobs being one, the blackberry outages, two, the third comes from Ireland.

Facebook Ireland is currently being accused of creating shadow profiles of users and non-user alike. What are shadow profiles? They are detailed records of personal information held by a private company without the consent of its users/clients. Several years ago, the US had a similar problem. After a graduate student emailed Facebook requesting his information from his account, he was supplied with decades of his old chats, friend requests and pokes. The same problem has arrived in Ireland.

It is believed that Facebook Ireland has been keeping records of its users. Phone numbers, email and home addresses, relationship status’ and location updates are being saved on Facebook’s private servers and are being kept for uses unknown. Nevertheless, users are not the only ones being targeted. Even people who have no Facebook account are being recorded. How do they do this? Whenever someone sends you a request to make a Facebook or tags you in a file, the data is saved. Even companies with advertisements on people’s pages have the option of uploading their subscribers email addresses to enhance their ads!

Facebook could be fined up to $137,000, but very little can be done other than that. Despite this, many privately owned organizations have launched investigations into the matter, but as of now, the only thing Facebook Ireland users can do is sit back and wait.

-Beck Goodloe