PRIVACY: Facebook bans creation of spying tools through data slurping.

Facebook has responded to reports that surveillance agencies are using the social network to create spying tools by updating its platform policy to ban such practices.

Rob Sherman, Deputy Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, announced the changes in a blog post on Monday.

The executive said that alterations to the language in the Facebook Platform Policy make it crystal clear that the development of surveillance tools through slurping Facebook profile data is no longer acceptable.

“Today we are adding language to our Facebook and Instagram platform policies to more clearly explain that developers cannot “use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance,”” Sherman says. “Our goal is to make our policy explicit.”

Over the past few months, the social networking giant claims to have taken action against developers which have taken advantage of the network’s rich range of user data to create, market, and sell spying tools.

Facebook, like government, hates competition.