Facebook Investigated by Canada for Violation of Privacy Laws

News Flash: Canada’s federal privacy commissioner is investigating Facebook after four students complained it violates Canadian law by disclosing personal information to advertisers without proper consent.

The University of Ottawa law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users, allege in a complaint lodged Friday that the social networking Web site has committed 22 violations of the law.

“There’s definitely some significant shortcomings with Facebook’s privacy settings and with their ability to protect users,” said Harley Finkelstein, 24, one of the students behind the complaint.

Facebook has refuted the claims, saying that the complaint ignores key elements of the company’s policy.

“We’ve reviewed the complaint and found it has serious factual errors — most notably its neglect of the fact that almost all Facebook data is willingly shared by users,” Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly said Friday in an e-mail.

Source

Or in other words Facebook is pleading Caveat Emptor.

What’s to learn from this? Be careful … be very careful what information you disclose to Social Networks because nothing is private.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Social Networks are NOT blogs. You have no control over your personal information or your content. They are for-profit corporate websites bent on using your info to make them money and they don’t give a hoot about your rights.