Canadian Officials Square Off with Facebook

Canada’s privacy commissioner’s office has forced Facebook to change the way it protects the personal information of its users.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, spent nearly a year investigating Facebook over a complaint raised by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic of the University of Ottawa about inadequate notifications relating to sharing of personal information.

As a result, Facebook will implement changes to its policies which will affect all 200 million users of its social network worldwide. The changes are expected to take place at the start of next year.

According to an article on www.data-strategy.co.uk, Stoddart comments that the changes will add significant privacy safeguards to bring the company in compliance with Canada’s private-sector privacy laws.

“During our investigation, one of the biggest concerns we raised was the over-sharing of users’ personal information with third-party developers who create popular Facebook applications such as games and quizzes,” she said. “Facebook has agreed to retrofit its application platform in order to prevent developers from accessing users’ personal information – unless users provide explicit consent.”

With this new permissions model, users adding an application will be advised the application wants access to specific categories of information; users will be able to control which information they are permitted to access.
According to the article, Canada is the first country to investigate the privacy practices of a global social networking site in this way and has attracted the interest of other countries including the European Union.