Nubeals Reports

CANADA: The Canadian privacy group, The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPC), has filed a complaint against Facebook, citing 22 separate breaches of privacy law in the country.

There are about 7 million users on Facebook (out of a total of 17.5 million Canadians on the Internet) and Clinic Director Phillipa Lawson feels that the company “needs to be held publicly accountable”.

The complaint that was filed with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner states that Facebook does not share with users exactly how their personal information will be used; neither does it completely remove the information from their database after a user account has been deleted.

A 35-page action was lodged after law students who studied the company’s policies and practices identified many policies that seemed to violate the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (Pipeda).

Facebook rejects the complaint. Their official argument against the complaint:

We pride ourselves on the industry leading controls we offer users over their private information. We believe that this is an important reason that nearly 40% of Canadians on the internet use our service.

We’ve reviewed the complaint and found it has serious factual errors, most notably its neglect of the fact that almost all Facebook data is willingly shared by users.

This is not the first time that Facebook has been accused of violation of privacy laws. Harley Finkelstein, 24 and a Facebook user for the last three years says, “Some 14-year-old kid might not know that privacy settings exist or how to take advantage of them or appreciate the ramifications of having their private information disclosed to third parties.”

In response, a Singapore student argues, “You can not talk about some 14-year-old kid who does not know how to use the Facebook interface. Chances are, the 14-year-old knows more about privacy settings than any older Facebook user.”

It all boils down to action now. Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart has a year to act on the CIPPC’s complaint but it may not even come to that because Facebook has promised Stoddart to educate the public around privacy controls on Facebook. This includes a brochure and even a video project that has already been completed with Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian.

“There is no general data protection or privacy law in Singapore. I wonder what kind of protection will be given by the small privacy division in (the) Ministry of Finance or the Information Development Authority (IDA) to protect Singaporeans from Facebook and other online social networking websites that exploit user information,” inquired another anonymous Singapore student.

The Singapore Constitution does not contain any explicit right to privacy. The High Court has ruled that personal information may be protected from disclosure under a duty of confidences. The IDA website states that there is “no overarching legislation for the protection of personal data in Singapore”.

UNITED STATES: After repeated requests from hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of people who have a lot of friends, Facebook has allowed users to add more than 5,000 friends.

This news comes in after they announced they are working to simplify the profile page – dividing it into several pages. They said this would allow them to retain the site’s easy interface for which it became popular in the first place.

This will be a good move to remove all the clutter created by the applications that are considered much like spam at the moment.

Whatever the case, I think the main complaint has been answered finally and you can add your 5,000 friends now.