Concerns over privacy issues with Facebook are not new, but the more recent changes did create expectations of intervention through the Privacy Commissioner.

I’m not sure if anyone expected a class action lawsuit in Canada.

Not surprisingly it’s the Merchant Law Group LLP that is heading this claim “for improper handling of confidential information and privacy issues.”

Tony Merchant said,

What Facebook is doing is a bait-and-switch process. The bait is that they wanted to be able to do demographic sales targeting, and the switch is that to do that, they needed to get into people’s personal information.

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Following my Part I and Part II blog entries on Facebook’s recent privacy updates, the latest news is that the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a Complaint with the FTC yesterday over these changes. EPIC is non-profit research center based in Washington, D.C.

The Complaint alleges that Facebook’s changes disclose personal information to the public that was previously restricted, as well as personal information to third parties that was not previously available. EPIC holds that such changes violate user expectations, diminish user privacy and contradict Facebook’s own representations. It has asked the FTC to investigate Facebook, and seek appropriate . . . [more]

In May 2008, University of Ottawa law students and The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) in Ottawa filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The office of the Commissioner has released its report today. The three biggest concerns found:

• Facebook’s explanations of privacy are confusing and incomplete;
• Facebook applications allow application developers access to private information where it is not necessary; and
• when a Facebook account is deactivated, Facebook still retains personal information. This is in contravention of Canada’s privacy law

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According to the English media, Facebook is thinking of generating an automatic warning to a member who posts a picture of a child to a publicly-accessible page on Facebook.

Is this a serious over-reaction to the threat that the kid – or the parents – face from such a posting? How many people are actually affected by predators of any kind using online pictures? What proportion are those victims of the numbers of people whose pics are on FB?

Is this a tactic by FB to appear to be concerned about privacy when its entire lucrative business model is . . . [more]

Facebook's founder says we're all to have one identity now. There is legal danger here & moral wrongheadedness.

The Hollywood Reporter writes: Facebook is back in the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s doghouse. According to the Privacy Commissioner’s news release of January 27, 2010, another investigation of Facebook has been launched in response to a new complaint – filed over changes made by Facebook in mid-December 2009, which required users to review their privacy settings. (See my previous posts part I, II and III looking at these changes.)

The complainant alleges that the new default settings would have made his information more readily available than the settings he had previously put in place. . . . [more]

The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,

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In R. v. Spencer^[1] the Supreme Court of Canada held that a reasonable expectation of privacy attaches to subscriber information — the name, address, and contact information — associated with an individual Internet Protocol (IP) address. In R. v. Bykovets^[2], the majority found that reasonable expectation of privacy extends to the numbers which make up an Internet protocol address even though those numbers might be changed at random by an Internet service provider.

The Facts

The Calgary City Police were investigating fraud in online liquor sales and came across a payment processor who processed the suspect transactions. . . . [more]

You’ll see it every few weeks on LinkedIn. Somebody somewhere is complaining that LinkedIn is not Facebook. They’re usually complaining about it on LinkedIn, and the comments on these posts bear an earie resemblance to social media platforms that are not LinkedIn.

Joshua Titsworth says that despite being founded in 2002, the site has gone through significant changes since that time,

The truth about LinkedIn is that despite its intended use, it has always been a form of social media… Given the relatively community-based origins of the site, it may seem strange to take issue with LinkedIn for becoming too

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We are witness to a parallel or alternate dimension where the constitutional rights democratic nations have toiled to enshrine and interpret, including freedom of speech, can be effectively – and imperceptibly – bypassed. While this situation prevailed prior to COVID-19, the pandemic has fast-tracked erratic private mediation of expression out of sheer necessity.

Questions respecting social media platforms’ ad hoc or arbitrary reactions to sensitive matters abound, including Twitter’s unprecedented restraint of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden piece and Facebook’s slowdown of the story.

Presumably recognizing some degree of state-like responsibility, platforms are deploying algorithmic decision-making tools and . . . [more]

“Minds have been opened and changed over the past few months,” legal author and commentator Richard Susskind wrote in a 2020 article titled The Future of Courts. “Many assumptions have been swept aside.”

The global pandemic has forced lawyers and justice system stakeholders out of their normal physical environments and into what on the surface appears to be the safe harbour of the virtual world. Remote hearings may protect us all from a virus; the platforms that make them possible may, however, have their own issues.

An internet truism is that if you’re not paying for the product, you are . . . [more]

Facebook is increasingly known to be used by older people, with well over a third of Canadians on Facebook being older than 45 years in August 2020. Despite the smaller user base, Facebook is almost two-thirds of all social media use by visits by all social media users in Canada.

With that much use, there’s bound to be problems. And where there are problems, there is often litigation.

The Saskatchewan Court of Appeal recently released a decision in Strom v Saskatchewan Registered Nurses’ Association, which set aside the decision by the Discipline Committee of the nurses’ regulatory college, that . . . [more]