BERLIN, Oct. 8 (Xinhua) -- The use of many social media applications still contains data-safety related risk for consumers in spite of the recently-passed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU), a study published on Monday by a major German consumer protection group finds.
Speaking at the presentation of the study in Berlin, the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer center criticized that default settings on many applications were not always designed in a way conducive to privacy protection.
Earlier, the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported that several German companies are considering an outright ban on the use of the popular social media applications such as WhatsApp and Snapchat on company-owned cellphones and tablets. The automotive supplier company Continental already decided to prohibit its employees from accessing WhatsApp and Snapchat back in June.
WhatsApp and Snapchat both require users to grant the two services access to their digital contact data, including potentially confidential information about third-parties. Under the GDPR, consent must be obtained from all parties involved in order for companies to legally access and store such data. However, neither WhatsApp, nor Snapchat, enables users to prevent the social media applications in questions from receiving potentially sensitive data.
On Monday, the North Rhine-Westphalia consumer center named Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn as social media applications which all requested users to provide access to their cellphone's contact information. The consumer rights group also expressed concern about a practice among networks to ask users for their own cellphone number, potentially revealing sensitive information about their identity.
In relative terms, WhatsApp was praised in the study for its careful use of tracking data because the service does not use personalized advertising yet as a financing model. By contrast, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube were seen as not being privacy friendly.
The North Rhine-Westphalia consumer center generally perceived "significant problems with regards to the response of social media service providers to the regulations of the GDPR." Even following the major regulatory overhaul which gave the EU some of the world's strictest data protection laws, consumers were still confronted with non-transparent use of their personal data and faced obstacles in regaining control over this information.
