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BERLIN — The European Commission is planning a legal change next year that may prompt U.S. Web giants like Google and Facebook to rethink how they store and process consumer data, raising the prospect of a trans-Atlantic dispute over Internet privacy.

The European law gives individuals more control over the use of data they enter on free Web services, but it has not been revised since 1995, when the Internet was still in its infancy.

Facebook and Google have signed the Safe Harbor Agreement, a 2000 pact between the United States and the European Union under which U.S. signatories promise to handle the data of European citizens according to E.U. rules.

Facebook came under fire Thursday from privacy advocates who say that changes to its ad network mark an unprecedented expansion of its ability to collect users' personal data.

Facebook, of course, is no stranger to privacy criticism. In 2011, the company settled charges with the FTC over changes to its privacy policy

"It's true that everybody is doing all of this, and that's how the system works," Chester said. "But this is unprecedented. Given Facebook's scale, this is a dramatic expansion of its spying on users."

Because key government business processes including policy development, community engagement, emergency management, business collaboration and project management are increasingly moving to social media channels. And social channels are complex spaces. They are third party owned and hosted, dynamic and collaborative. Maintaining important information in these environments can be very challenging. We therefore need to take heed of the fact that a lot of key business operations are moving to social media technologies, and we need to think about this transition from an information-based perspective. For example, as a result of the transition to social, increasingly there will not be formal publications, or reports, or white papers or meeting minutes or other fixed, formal, standard forms of accountability and history that we have traditionally relied upon. Instead there will be wikis and tweets and Facebook forums and blog posts and a host of fantastic, dynamic, collaboratively developed content but by itself this will not survive to be the stuff of history, it will not survive to be accessible under FOI or GIPA review, it may not even survive to be part of formal annual reporting a year from now.

Facebook will use the information gathered from all those sources to identify its users' interests and match them with advertising, as it already does with information about their onsite activities.

A screenshot illustrating the function showed that clicking on one corner of the ad will drop down a menu allowing users to select one of four options: "I don't want to see this," "Hide all ads from this advertiser," "Why am I seeing this?" and "This ad is useful." Asking for more information will show the interest areas identified by Facebook to which the ad is related, allowing users to reject further ads associated with that interest.

Facebook will use the information gathered from all those sources to identify its users' interests and match them with advertising, as it already does with information about their onsite activities.

most (74%) use social networks as a megaphone, announcing events and activities and sharing organization-centric info.

Nonprofits overwhelmingly (88%) said their most important communication tools were email and their websites, even though fully 97% of them are on Facebook. This may have to do with the fact that in their mind, the pinnacle of engagement is a donation (47%).

Facebook's leaning on the Fourth Amendment, saying the government doesn't have the right to seize, look at, or keep private messages, shared media, or other communications of users without those people knowing.