Fr: CNIL Cites French Yellow Pages Operator for Illegal Use of Social Media Data

Winston Maxwell writes:

France’s Data Protection Authority, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) announced on September 23, 2011 that it had found the French provider of universal telephone directory services, “Pages Jaunes,” guilty of violating several provisions of the French data protection law. The CNIL did not fine Pages Jaunes, but published a detailed warning, listing each privacy violation that the CNIL had identified during its investigation of Pages Jaunes’s activities.

Read more on Hogan Lovells Chronicles of Data Protection.  It’s interesting that CNIL flatly rejected Yellow Page’s claims that it could crawl social media sites and use the data because the TOS of those sites warned users that public profiles could be crawled.