The Dutch government said Friday that it may be forced to stop using Facebook after a warning from the Netherlands’ privacy regulator about the Meta owned social media platform’s privacy risks.

The Dutch Data Protection Authority (DPA) issued a statement advising the Dutch Interior Ministry not to rely on Facebook pages to communicate with citizens if it doesn’t have a clear idea of how Facebook uses the personal data of people who visit government pages.

  • @[email protected]
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    3122 days ago

    Err, wut? That they were using it at all is disappointing.

    It was clearly a privacy nightmare from day one - that anyone in IT let it be used is a major failure on their part.

    I even said as much to my peers at the time.

    • @[email protected]
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      2722 days ago

      They want to be able to have their information available where the population can see it. The population was/is on facebook so they post information to facebook. They did not rely on it, they just used it as another avenue for communication. Still good that they’re moving off of it though.

      • @Blue_Morpho
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        822 days ago

        But Facebook is a webpage. Anything they put on Facebook should be on their webpage instead.

        • @SirQuackTheDuck
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          22 days ago

          It is, they’re usually posts like “bought your first house? Find out how housing taxes work on rijksoverheid.nl”.

          The Dutch government seems to be pretty stringent on their single source of truth policy on the web.

      • @[email protected]
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        522 days ago

        Yeah, it’s not about privacy or anything like that. Which is why I don’t understand this decision at all. It’s not like they have to do anything besides public announcements on Facebook. What privacy are they trying to protect?

        • @[email protected]
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          122 days ago

          The privacy concerns are about facebook knowing in detail what government news Dutch citizens interact with.