By Aaron Miller-
Facebook has been ordered to pay a hefty $9-million penalty after making “false or misleading claims about the privacy of Canadians’ personal information,” The Eye Of Media.Com has learnt.
The judgement comes in the wake of an investigation into the social media company’s privacy practices between 2012 and 2018. The Competition Bureau today said Facebook falsely represented how much information users could control — including the personal information of users’ friends who had installed “certain third-party applications.”
“Canadians expect and deserve truth from businesses in the digital economy, and claims about privacy are no exception,” Competition Bureau Commissioner Matthew Boswell wrote in the statement. “The Competition Bureau will not hesitate to crack down on any business that makes false or misleading claims to Canadians about how they use personal data, whether they are multinational corporations like Facebook or smaller companies.”
The Bureau’s findings covers data on both Facebook and Messenger, where users were given the impression they could control who can see and access their personal information. Instead, third-party developers were able to access some of that information in ways inconsistent with Facebook policies.
The ruling means that Facebook will also be required to pay an additional $500,000 to the Bureau for the costs of the investigation.
Heavy fines of this sort is nothing new to the giant social media firm. In 2018, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission levied a $5-billion fine against the company, the largest it has ever imposed on a tech company. In 2016, France’s privacy regulator forced Facebook to change its tracking policy.
In 2017, Facebook was fined €10m (£8.9m) by Italian authorities for misleading users over its data practices.
The two fines issued by Italy’s competition watchdog was one of the largest levied against the social media company for data misuse.
On that occasion, the Italian regulator found that Facebook had breached articles 21, 22, 24 and 25 of the country’s consumer code by:
Facebook was accused of misleading users in the sign-up process about the extent to which provided data would be used for commercial purposes.
Emphasising only the free nature of the service, without informing users of the “profitable ends that underlie the provision of the social network”, and so encouraging them to make a decision of a commercial nature that they would not have taken if they were in full possession of the facts
Competition Bureau Commissioner Matthew Boswell said in a statement:
“Canadians expect and deserve truth from businesses in the digital economy, and claims about privacy are no exception.
“The Competition Bureau will not hesitate to crack down on any business that makes false or misleading claims to Canadians about how they use personal data, whether they are multinational corporations like Facebook or smaller companies.”