According to a recent complaint against Facebook Ireland, the international headquarters of the famous social networking site, Facebook has been keeping data on users that are not registered with the site.

Facebook Logo. Photo courtesy of Creative Commons.

Using information gathered from phones, email providers, IM conversations, and other means of communication, Facebook is claimed to be making hidden "shadow" profiles, consisting of private data, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, work information, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, and more. 

From the formal complaint: 

By gathering all this information, Facebook Ireland is creating extensive profiles of non-users and it is also enriching existing user profiles (see attachment 04). This is done in the background without notice to the data subject (“shadow profiles”); the user or non-user is only experiencing some of the result of these shadow  profiles:  There are “friend” suggestions by Facebook Ireland based on the information or non-users get invitations showing many users that they actually know in real life.

If this allegation is true, Facebook will face a €100,000 fine for breaching Irish data protection laws. 

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