User privacy concerns have been a thorn at Facebook for the past few weeks. It started off with the previously discussed Beacon program that Facebook introduced which tracked users buying habits. Advertisers would use this information to promote the items to the user’s friends. Thanks to pressure from user community and civil liberties groups Beacon was made an opt-in program. But that didn’t stop Facebook from using users’ pictures to advertise products. Now BBC is reporting that the British Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating Facebook over user privacy concerns.

Facebook users can deactivate their accounts quite easily. But this does not delete their profile and activity data from Facebook webservers. In order to delete the your data you have to manually remove wall postings, pictures, videos, application data and whatever else is associated to the account. This is a tedious process which most users ignore after deactivating their account. This is quite clearly a concern to the ICO. “An individual who has deactivated their account might not find themselves motivated enough to delete information that’s about them maybe on their wall or other people’s site.” says Dave Evans, Senior Data Protection Practice Manager at the ICO told BBC Radio 4′s iPM programme.

The following image is from Facebook where you are asked a bunch of questions. Notice at the very bottom of the image it says other people can still invite you to events after deactivation.
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