Privacy Commission’s report on Facebook, their jurisdiction and findings
The report resulting from the privacy complaint against Facebook has just been released. Just like when the complaint was reported on slashdot, there’s a lot of hubbub about the complaint being accepted. Well, when you’re collecting information on Canadians, you ought to respect Canadian privacy law. Facebook has made a few changes to their privacy settings, some in response to the complaint but most in response to general user concern, which makes most of the original complaint moot. It’s still an interesting case.
The Abika case has already shown that the Privacy Commission has the jurisdiction to hear complaints on foreign companies. Whether or not they can do anything about it is another matter. In this case Facebook isn’t entirely foreign since they have at least one Canadian office in Toronto. As shown in Wu and Goldsmith’s Who Controls the Internet
Most of the issues have been sorted out. The last big ones are explained by Michael Geist, with the particularly nasty ones being third party applications and data collection of non-users. I’m not going to close my account but I’m going to be as careful with third party applications as I ever was.
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3 Comments to “Privacy Commission’s report on Facebook, their jurisdiction and findings”
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I think a lot more needs to be done about privacy on the internet, but I believe the solution is in education, not legislation.
People need to know that they make a choice to become public figures the second they make an online account. The level of celebrity they ultimately achieve is difficult to predict and for most people is negligible (and in fact is probably going to be fairly low without sufficient marketing), but just remember: Star Wars Kid and the NumaNuma guy probably weren’t planning on becoming memes.
The report also deals with Facebook’s gathering of information on people who aren’t Facebook members. If I tag a photo of a friend who doesn’t have a Facebook account with his name and e-mail, Facebook will still use that data despite not being allowed to.
I agree with Warren. People should know that when they join a social networking site such as Facebook, all the information they enter when creating account or other affiliates that could link to this kind of site would automatically use by the company or be exposed. People should just be more cautious when dealing with their private information.