A Canadian law clinic has filed a complaint against Facebook claiming that the service violates Canada's privacy law, according to a story by IDG news service.
The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law says Facebook is guilty of 22 violations, including failing to obtain permission from users to disclose their personal information and failing to inform users that their information is given to advertisers. The complaint is based on privacy policies that were in place up to mid-March, before Facebook provided users with a method in April to delete cookies generated by its Beacon advertising program.
Harley Finkelstein, a law student who helped file the complaint, says that the privacy controls the service offers users are inadequate. Even if a user sets his account to have the highest privacy settings, his information is not necessarily protected if friends who are associated with his account have lower privacy settings. And anyone who uses a third-party application will be default expose their personal information to the developer of the application.
Canada's privacy commissioner has up to a year to address the complaint.
Photo: AP