Toronto: Indicting Facebook for privacy violations, Canada's Privacy Commissioner on Thursday said though "privacy issues are top of mind for Facebook, and (yet) we found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates.''
The social networking site, which has about 250 million users worldwide, has been under the scanner for allegations that it violates Canadian privacy laws. More than 12 million Canadians use the website.
The investigation was launched after a complaint by intern law students at the Ottawa-based Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic in 2008. In their complaint to the Privacy Commission, the students had said that the website was passing on users' personal information to advertisers without their permission.
Listing 21 privacy violations by Facebook, the students had said it infringed the law by failing to identify the purpose for which it collects users' personal information and obtains consent to use and disclose their personal information.
The complaint had said that the "account settings'' page describes how to deactivate accounts, but not how to delete them to actually remove personal data from Facebook's servers.''
The students had also alleged that it "didn't destroy personal information of those who terminate their services and failed to safeguard personal information from unauthorized access.''
Releasing its report after a 13-month-long probe, Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said onThursday, "We found serious privacy gaps in the way the site operates. Canadians truly need to know what they are getting into when joining Facebook and should be able to control the information they share.''
The Privacy Commission urged Facebook "to implement all of our recommendations to further enhance their site, ensure they are in compliance with privacy law, and ultimately show themselves as models of privacy.''
The investigation report raised concerns over the sharing of users' personal information with third-party developers creating Facebook applications such as games and quizzes. There are more than 950,000 developers in some 180 countries.
The report said Facebook lacks adequate safeguards to restrict these outside developers from accessing profile information.
It said Facebook's policy of indefinitely keeping the personal information even after deactivation of an account violated the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act of Canada.
"We urge Facebook to implement all of our recommendations to further enhance their site, ensure they are in compliance with privacy law, and ultimately show themselves as models of privacy,'' said Assistant Commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who led the investigation.
She said the Privacy Commission will review after 30 days how Facebook has complied with its mandatory recommendations.
In response, Facebook said it "will soon be introducing a number of new additional privacy features to its service that we believe will keep the site at the forefront of user privacy and address any remaining concerns the (Privacy) Commission may have.''
More than one third of Canadians use Facebook, making it the website's third biggest base after the US and the UK.
Facebook has 250 million active users worldwide till date.
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