OPC will file suit against Facebook before election: Commish

OTTAWA — The Office of the Privacy Commissioner plans to file in Federal Court a lawsuit against Facebook Inc. before this year’s federal election, commissioner Daniel Therrien said Tuesday, following the completion of a year-long investigation that found the social media giant broke Canadian law when it enabled the scraping of data from its platform without consent. “We will file at the latest in the early fall, probably before that,” Therrien told reporters following testimony at the House of Commons ethics committee on Tuesday. The ethics committee brought the OPC before it to discuss its office’s spending over the year, as well as the year-long Facebook investigation it undertook with its privacy counterparts in British Columbia, which concluded late last month. The investigation was opened last March after revelations that Facebook allowed data analytics company Cambridge Analytica to scrape the personal information of its users without consent. The data was then used to influence the 2016 U.S. election. The scandal, which reportedly compromised 87 million Facebook accounts globally, swept up the data of around 620,000 Canadians, which Therrien previously said is a big enough number to impact elections here. Following the conclusion of the investigation, which included the threat of legal action, experts told this publication that there was no road map for a lawsuit against Facebook. In fact, the experts said the suit has no real precedent in Canadian courts. But Therrien said Tuesday that the office has been putting together new information to present to court. “It’s not just a matter of filing our report and asking the court to agree with it,” Therrien said. “We need to file new evidence; that will take a bit of time.” The basis of the suit is Facebook’s refusal to follow any of the privacy watchdog’s recommendations in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and during the OPC’s investigation, the office says. Those recommendations would align of the private sector privacy law, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, including obtaining meaningful consent and informing users, in a timely manner, of the purposes of disclosure of users’ personal information. The OPC claims Facebook’s privacy and consent practices are currently in violation of PIPEDA. Responding to questions about the office’s budget, Therrien told the ethics committee on Tuesday that the cost of the lawsuit -- including if the OPC hires outside counsel -- will come out of its own budget. Last year, the office said a 90-per cent increase to its budget would give it “true impact.” And in its most recent budget, the federal government pledged $22 million over five years to the office’s coffers, which the OPC called “interim relief.” Therrien’s statement about the lawsuit’s timing came after the ethics committee voted unanimously to issue a subpoena to Facebook’s top executives, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, to appear at an upcoming meeting of the International Grand Committee on Disinformation and ‘Fake News’ on May 28 in Ottawa. The committee will bring together lawmakers from some nine countries, whom last met in London in November. Zuckerberg declined to appear there. NDP MP Charlie Angus, who brought the motion to issue the subpoena, admitted that the committee cannot compel Zuckerberg to cross the border, but said, “the fact that a Parliament even has to consider issuing a subpoena against the head of a major corporation just shows how much trust Facebook has broken in terms of good corporate governance. “They’ve just blown off the really damning findings of our privacy commissioner, telling us that they don’t even respect or recognize the jurisdiction of Canada,” he said. The Cambridge Analytica scandal set-off a renewed focus on privacy and data, unleashed a torrent of subsequent news stories about data breaches at the company and elsewhere, and forced the company recently to orient its focus on privacy first. Therrien also asked the ethics committee to renew his longstanding call for updates to Canada’s privacy laws, which would give his office the power to issue binding orders and fines. He also again called for an increase to the office’s budget in order to keep up with the changing dynamics around privacy in the digital economy. — With reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Ahmad Hathout at ahathout@thewirereport.ca

OPC will file suit against Facebook before election: Commish

News | May 8, 2019

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OPC will file suit against Facebook before election: Commish

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