Facebook is under fire from the privacy commissioner for insufficient privacy protection
You shouldn’t need a master’s degree to understand how Facebook privacy settings work, said David Fewer, the acting director of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa.
The clinic filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, sparking an investigation into the privacy policies of the popular social networking site.
“We watched as Facebook poured into Canada from the United States, where there is an entirely different privacy regime,” said Fewer.
“Personal information isn’t nearly as protected there as it is in Canada . . . [and] we were curious to see, as more Canadians joined up, did they respect our laws and rights regarding privacy?”
According to Fewer, Facebook has the biggest market of any other social networking site in Canada – it boasts more than 250 million users worldwide – and claims it is the most privacy-conscious of the lot.
“But when we looked into it we saw a gap between their privacy settings and our laws,” Fewer said.
The report by the privacy commissioner found that Facebook unnecessarily gives more than 950,000 application developers access to personal information and allows users to provide personal information about non-users (such as e-mail addresses and full names in photo tags) which Facebook then retains.
The report also found that Facebook breaches Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) because the site keeps information from deactivated accounts indefinitely.
Under PIPEDA, information can only be kept for a specified amount of time and must be destroyed when it is no longer needed to fulfill its original purpose.
“Even though the Internet is public . . . it is still subject to privacy laws,” said Jessica Gulley, a mass communications graduate. “And if [the office of the privacy commissioner] finds there’s a breach of those laws then, yeah, [it] has every right to get Facebook to change its policies.”
Gulley said she got Facebook in her first year of university so she could stay in touch with friends and family, but her privacy settings were “already really tight” before the inquiry.
Fewer said that users in Canada should be concerned that a site as large and as prominent as Facebook isn’t meeting its requirements under the law.
He said it is partly the users’ responsibility to read the privacy policy and adjust their settings according to how much of their personal information they want released.
However, Fewer does place the onus on Facebook to make better and more comprehensive controls.
Andrew Dunn, a second-year biology student, said he got Facebook back in high school but admitted he doesn’t use it half as often as he used to.
“Cops can go on and see stuff,” Dunn said. “Not that I’m an unlawful person. I just mean that you know your information is being seen and you’ve got to be more careful.”