OPC will ask court to force changes to Facebook privacy practices

OTTAWA — The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said Thursday it is turning to Federal Court to force Facebook Inc. to improve its privacy practises, after it found the social media giant broke Canadian law when it scraped data off millions of users on behalf of Cambridge Analytica. That’s according to a report released this morning, jointly authored by the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner and British Columbia’s Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner, which concluded an investigation launched last March. The report said Facebook violated the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), but the OPC said Thursday Facebook has told the OPC that it disagrees with the findings of the report, and has refused to implement any of the report’s recommendations. As a result, the privacy commissioner plans to go to Federal Court to ask for an order to force Facebook “to correct” its privacy practices, commissioner Daniel Therrien said in a statement. “It is untenable that organizations are allowed to reject my office’s legal findings as mere opinions. Facebook should not get to decide what Canadian privacy law does or does not require,” he said. Facebook’s rejection of the OPC’s findings and its refusal to implement any of its recommendations has highlighted what Therrien and his B.C. counterpart Michael McEvoy said at a Thursday morning press conference is a serious gap in Canadian enforcement mechanisms when it comes to privacy violations. While it emerged in Facebook’s first quarter earnings report this week that the company has set aside as much as $5 billion dollars in anticipation of fines coming down from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its own investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the two privacy commissioners pointed out at a press conference that fines levied by Canadian federal courts are historically far lower -- “in the tens of thousands,” Therrien told reporters. So even if the OPC succeeds in court, the penalties assessed would amount to almost nothing for a company the size of Facebook. “In the current world that we live in, privacy protection cannot only be on the shoulders of users,” he said. Asked if he still has a Facebook account himself, Therrien said that the OPC would delete whatever small presence it had. “We do not want to continue to be associated with an organization that we found is irresponsible," he told reporters Thursday. The report in particular found that the app TYDL -- also known as thisisyourdigitallife -- was able to scrape data, including names, genders, certain pictures, and in some cases private messages off some 87 million Facebook users, including those who had never installed the app at all. According to the OPC report, Facebook’s “purported safeguards were, at the time the TYDL App was launched, superficial and still do not, in our view, adequately protect users’ personal information.” The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke when Christopher Wylie, the Canadian who helped build Cambridge Analytica, blew the whistle on the company. It was later revealed that he was paid $100,000 for services performed under a separate company for the Liberal Caucus Research Bureau. Today, Therrien renewed his call for political parties to be brought under the umbrella of privacy laws. “If companies like Cambridge Analytica analyse and profile individuals with a view to targeting them with political messages, it is because there is someone who may benefit,” he said at a press conference. “Political parties are the ultimate clients of this kind of activity.” McEvoy pointed out that his province, British Columbia, is the only jurisdiction in the country where political parties are subject to privacy laws. He told reporters that his office is currently in conversation with parties about establishing a voluntary code of practice, governing how parties handle information in the course of a campaign. As Canada heads into a federal election, the Communications Security Establishment announced earlier this month that it is “very likely” that the election would face some kind of cyber foreign interference. This week Elections Canada released its guidelines for tech giants wanting to sell political advertisements on their platforms, giving shape to provisions from the Elections Modernization Act of December last year. The law requires tech companies to establish a publicly available database of political ads and information about who paid for them. Facebook has said it will comply. Last year, professors from the University of Ottawa called for Facebook to be regulated the same way broadcasters are. Today, Therrien said that “we are seeing the limits” of the model of voluntary compliance with regulatory bodies by tech giants. When “the company is no longer interested in cooperating, and that is where the regulator needs teeth,” he said. The situation amounts to what Therrien called “surveillance capitalism,” and sought to ground the issue of data privacy in human rights. “We have a charter of rights, and ... privacy laws, public and private sector, should be based on that very important foundation,” he said. — With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

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OPC will ask court to force changes to Facebook privacy practices

Broadcast | April 25, 2019

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