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Facebook v. Canada? Networking giant faces class-action suit

Canada is taking Facebook to court.

Merchant Law Group, a Canadian firm with offices across the country and in the United States, is asking the social networking site to defend its revamped privacy policy.

With over 500 million users worldwide and over 15 million in Canada, this may be the largest class action suit in the country’s history.

Tony Merchant at the Merchant Law Group’s Regina office gives the background to the case: “Facebook guaranteed privacy” and assured users that the site was “more private than you would have ever expected” from an online social network.

Merchant notes that before the changes to the site’s privacy settings took effect in November of 2009, users “might have put up tax information, exchanged sexual pictures...or used the site for business purposes. These may be strange examples,” he says, but before the site changed its privacy policy near the end of last year, whatever information users supplied remained relatively secure.

According to site’s privacy guide, “Facebook is about sharing.” The fine print, mentions “cookies” that track users and make the site “easier to use.” The privacy guide says the cookies are in place to “protect both you and Facebook.”

The class-action suit centres on the site’s close monitoring of its users. “Facebook was already a very profitable venture,” says Merchant. “They decided they could become far more profitable through targeted advertising,” a move that required tracking users’ activity.

This was accomplished using what Merchant refers to as “harvesters” – computer programs that collect information on users such as sex, geographic location, interests, age, and the like. These “harvesters” used to be blocked from accessing users’ private information.

In November, Facebook “upgraded” its privacy settings. “The default” says Merchant, “unless you were willing to go through twenty-seven pages of privacy information and options – and few users were – was that your previously private information became semi-public.”

It was “a bait-and-hook” he continues, “they knew it would happen.”

The new privacy settings allow Facebook to target advertising to users’ interests based on what the “harvesters” gather about their web activity.

This information makes the website much more desirable to advertisers. “If they could find out that Brian Mulroney was a potential purchaser of expensive scotch, and that Barack Obama liked expensive cars, they could try and market Chivas Blue Label to one and Jaguars to the other,” explains Merchant.

Merchant’s class-action suit already has 800 individuals signed up. The legal action, levied against the social media giant for “improper handling of confidential information” and “privacy issues,” adds Canada to the growing list of countries dissatisfied with Facebook’s conduct: a number of U.S. states are considering taking Facebook to court, and prosecution is being considered in a number of European nations.

Shannon Smart is completing a practicum at The Tyee

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