Facebook receives Big Brother Award
The social network site Facebook has received Germany's Big Brother Award, an award given to government and business organizations that excel in scrupulously, unauthorized and insatiably collecting data from personal computers.
Facebook received this recognition in the "Communications" category for its practice to take possession of telephone numbers and e-mail addresses from users' address books without informing users that this information will be stored permanently, unless they choose to delete them from Facebook's server, and without instructions on how to do that. Helpful for winning this prize was Facebook's user agreement that puts the burden of obtaining a person's permission to use his/her address and phone number on the user who's address book facebook copies it from.