25 millions individuals were impacted including minors and unlisted people ; hence a large portion of the French society which counts about 65 millions of people.

The French Authority considered that this consisted in an unfair collection of data, as the individuals could not be deemed as having knowingly provided their data to the social networks so that it be used to add value to an online directory, especially minors and unlisted individuals.

The privacy notice put on the white pages site did not convince the Authority, since it was read by the user of the site doing a search, not so much by the people whose name appear in the directory.

The CNIL agreed that the individuals could have been properly informed by the terms and conditions of the social networks. However the Yellow Pages cannot rely on the Facebook terms which refer to the possibility for profiled to be indexed by third party search engines. The CNIL is of the opinion that the site is primarily a directory, not a search engine, and that the FB terms do not meet the French law notice requirements.

The data controller had concluded an agreement with one of the social networks, TROMBI, so that they add a specific notice on their site, which led the CNIL to the conclusion, that providing notice to individuals did not trigger disproportionate efforts.

Among other non compliances, the CNIL in its decision of September 21 that the linked profiles were often outdated (e.g. 80% of FB profiles had not been updated for more than 4 months) and that it was very burdensome for individuals to exercise their rights of rectification and objection.
Published in the Privacy Advisor the IAPP newsletter Oct 2011 Volume 11 n°8