Social networking sites are legally responsible for their users' privacy, Europe's privacy watchdogs have confirmed. A committee of data protection regulators has said that the sites are 'data controllers', with all the legal obligations that brings. Users of the sites are also data controllers with legal obligations when they are posting on behalf of a club, society or company, the opinion said. The committee of Europe's data protection regulators, the Article 29 Working Party, has published its opinion on the legal status of social networking operators such as Facebook and MySpace. It has said that the sites cannot escape their legal obligations just because content on them is often produced and posted by users.

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