Is Facebook Breaking Privacy Laws?
By Ian Scott
I just logged off the popular and well known “Social Networking” site, Facebook after playing some Scrabulous moves with some of my friends. There is no doubt that Facebook can be a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances and some of the third party applications such as Scrabulous are popular with Facebook users. But there are some who are very concerned about personal privacy that many users may be giving up unknowingly.
Indeed, over the weekend, I discovered that one of my friends had information available that they absolutely did not want available to anyone except friends. This potential breach of privacy occurred when my friend joined a network. Prior to joining a network, my friend had all personal information including their profile settings so that only friends could view anything - but when joining the network, anyone in the network that had been joined could now see the entire profile, status updates, etc. Clearly, Facebook should have provided a warning that the privacy settings might need to be adjusted when joining a network at the very least and preferably kept the original privacy settings set by the user.
Today, I’m reading that Facebook is the subject of a possible investigation by Canada’s Privacy Commission. Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) is alleging at least 22 violations of Canada’s privacy laws with one of the biggest concerns regarding how much information third party developers (non Facebook applications such as Scrabulous and other games and widgets) can get about users that add those applications.
There is more information detailing the complaints and concerns by CIPPIC at itbusiness.ca.
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