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Facebook Violates Canadian Privacy Law
Myriad and a number of other readers passed along the news that the Canadian Privacy Commissioner has made a determination that Facebook violates Canadian privacy law in four different respects. Canada has the highest per-capita facebook participation in the world — about a third of the population — according to coverage in The Star. The EU is also expressing similar privacy concerns, though Canada's action "represents the most exhaustive official investigation of Facebook privacy practices anywhere in the world," says Michael Geist. The CBC's coverage spells out the areas of privacy concern, in particular that nearly a million developers of Facebook apps in 180 countries have full access to the entirety of users' private data. Also of concern: Facebook holds on to your data indefinitely after you quit the site. The BBC notes that Facebook is working with the privacy commission to resolve the issues, and quotes a Facebook spokesman thus: "Overall, we are looking for practical solutions that operate at scale and respect the fact that people come to share and not to hide." (Schneier recently blogged about research on "privacy salience," and cited Facebook's practices among others' as practical examples of how social networking sites have learned not to push the privacy issue in users' faces.)
I was forced to sign up for Facebook in university at the point of alcoholic intoxication. I have since deactivated my Facebook account but I fear that they may be keeping hold of my fake name and address thus linking me to all of my other cybercrimes. With any luck, and since I am Canadian, this legal movement will have Facebook remove that information.
They can shut down Canada as long as the size of my Mafia does not suffer.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
To most facebook users, when they send a private message to someone through the site, they assume it remains private. When they delete a message, they assume it is deleted.
There's a reasonable expectation.
For example my private information shouldn't automatically be made available to some third party just because some half-wit on my friends list took at 'Which punctuation mark are you?' quiz.
I can't view other peoples profiles if they don't want me to, unless I make some idiotic quiz that they take.
And that was the last Terry Fox run I ever participated in.