As Facebook stumbles, we must protect online privacy

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on December 27, 2018.

The Trudeau government now has even more reason to take action in the New Year on an increasingly urgent issue: protecting Canadians’ privacy from social media giants that have accumulated far too much power for their own good — and ours.

The latest evidence comes courtesy of the New York Times, which reports that Facebook gave some of the biggest tech companies far more intrusive access to its users’ personal information than anyone — especially the users — knew.

For years, it partnered with scores of companies like Netflix, Spotify, Microsoft and Amazon in ways that made users’ data available to them, despite Facebook’s own privacy policies. In essence, it stretched the bounds of its privacy policies to keep valuable partners onside while keeping its users in the dark.

This is bad news for Facebook at the end of a very bad year for the company. It has stumbled its way through a series of disasters: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its worst-ever security breach, and revelations of how Mark Zuckerberg and its other top leaders used hardball tactics to push back against their critics.

The new report is an eye-opener, in that it shines a light on something that Facebook’s 2.2 billion users have been only dimly aware of — the ways the social media behemoth turns their personal data into a tradable commodity.

Facebook doesn’t sell users’ data. But, as the Times reports, internal documents show that “it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.”

Some of the companies involved, including the Royal Bank of Canada, say their deals with Facebook weren’t as intrusive as reported. (RBC, for example, says it never had the ability to see users’ messages.) But other companies had the right to see information about users’ friends or even read their private messages.

All this is complicated and beyond the ability of the great majority of social media users to monitor and control. That’s why it’s important that governments step in and make sure the tech giants don’t violate our privacy and pollute our political environment, as happened when Cambridge Analytica used personal data from 87 million users (including hundreds of thousands of Canadians) in an attempt to manipulate voter behaviour.

It’s clear that law and government policies aren’t keeping up with advances in technology. Fortunately, the government has just been handed a roadmap on where it should focus its attention, in the form of a report from the parliamentary committee that looked into the fallout from Cambridge Analytica.

The MPs, from all parties, urged the government to “act urgently” to protect Canadians’ privacy. And they made recommendations that would go some way to change the balance of power between the social media companies and ordinary users.

The companies would have to make it a lot easier to figure out who is trying to influence voters through online political advertising. They would have to identify “bots,” or automated accounts, and remove accounts set up to impersonate others. And they would be required to remove “manifestly illegal content” quickly or face big fines.

All this would help to sanitize the political atmosphere on social media platforms. But other steps would be needed to beef up the rules governing how users consent to use of their personal information, in order to prevent the companies from engaging in the type of questionable behaviour revealed by the New York Times.

For that, privacy laws must be reviewed to make sure they are adequate to the challenge of the age of data. And, as the MPs recommend, the federal privacy commissioner should have stronger powers to order the tech companies to comply with the law and back that up with substantial penalties.

Facebook and the other social media platforms have shown they can’t be trusted to clean up their own houses. It’s time the government made serious oversight a top priority.

— Toronto Star

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