Claiming that certain aspects of your personal data is “a trade secret or intellectual property of Facebook Ireland Limited or its licensors” seems pretty extraordinary. Schrems is not letting things rest there, though, and has contacted the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to pursue the matter further. Meanwhile, Facebook has released a statement on the matter:

We are cooperating fully with the Irish Data Protection Commissioner who will come to a view on Mr Schrems’ complaint in due course.

I can hardly wait for that view – and for Facebook’s response if it requires the release of some “proprietary” data.

via Facebook Says Some of Your Personal Data Is Its ‘Trade Secrets or Intellectual Property’ | Techdirt.

I’m not sure how this is going to end, but “well” is not much of an option.   And the thing is….Europe has about 10x the privacy protections that U.S. citizens have.  It won’t be until this data is massively abused that anyone will say anything, and will probably be too late by that point any way.

Once we allowed credit companies to sell data about our personal spending habits to others, and have to buy them back ourselves, we were already lost.