By Ashley Young-
Facebook broke Canadian privacy laws when it collected the information of some 600,000 citizens.A top watchdog in the country said on Thursday, it was determined to seek a court order to force the social media company to change its practices. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) released its “troubling” findings on Thursday after a year long probe into Facebook’s privacy practices.
The report blasts Facebook for disputing the agency’s conclusions and for not agreeing to greater regulatory oversight.Facebook said on Wednesday it had set aside $3bn to cover a settlement with US regulators probing revelations that the company had inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million of its users with. Cambridge Analytica
“The stark contradiction between Facebook’s public promises to mend its ways on privacy and its refusal to address the serious problems we’ve identified — or even acknowledge that it broke the law — is extremely concerning,” Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in a statement.
Canada’s privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, made his comments as it released the results of an investigation, it opened last year into a data sharing scandal involving Facebook and the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The multi billion pound social media company made a profit of $22 billion last year on $56 billion in total revenue, or a profit margin of 45%. Still, the potential cost of an FTC penalty grabbed the attention of Facebook analysts.
“This is a significant development, and any settlement with the FTC may impact the ways advertisers can use the platform in the future,” eMarketer Principal Analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a note.
Though Facebook has acknowledged a “major breach of trust” in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company disputed the results of the Canadian investigation, Therrien said.
“Facebook’s refusal to act responsibly is deeply troubling given the vast amount of sensitive personal information users have entrusted to this company,” said Therrien.Facebook’s monthly user base grew 8 percent, to 2.3 billion, from the year before, the company reported Wednesday. But its North America users stayed nearly flat, at 243 million.
The investigation revealed there was an “overall lack of responsibility” with people’s personal information that means “there is a high risk that” their data “could be used in ways that they do not know or suspect, exposing them to potential harms”. The investigation highlighted problems in regulating social media.
Therrien asked for more sanctioning power, as it said that Facebook’s rejection of the watchdog’s recommendations revealed “critical weaknesses” in the current legislation.
“We should not count on all companies to act responsibility and therefore a new law should ensure a third party, a regulator, holds companies responsible,” Therrien said.
The Canadian democratic institutions minister Karina Gould, who this month said the government might have to regulate Facebook and other social media companies unless they did more to help combat foreign meddling in this October’s election, will react later on Thursday, a spokeswoman said.
Facebook said on Wednesday it had set aside $3bn to cover a settlement with US regulators probing revelations that the company had inappropriately shared information belonging to 87 million of its users with. Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook said in a statement that it had engaged “in many months of good-faith co-operation and lengthy negotiations” with the commissioner’s office and is disappointed that the matter is going to court instead of “continuing collaborative discussions”