How Canada made Facebook better for everyone
You might remember that Canada’s Privacy Commissioner slammed Facebook about a month ago that it was in violation of Canada’s privacy laws–Facebook breaches Canadian privacy law: commissioner. This was a big deal. There are real teeth to Canada’s privacy law (PIPEDA) which could have posed real legal and financial threats to Facebook’s future.
Today we heard from the Privacy Commissioner again about Facebook, this time with good news–Facebook to make privacy changes and BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook changes privacy policy–news that should be welcomed not only by Canadians, but Facebook users world-wide.
The two biggest changes, and greatest victories for us as users, are that Facebook will make it very clear what the difference is between disabling your account and deleting your account (the latter ensuring that your information is deleted, the former it will stay around) and the people who make Facebook applications will have a much, much smaller amount of personal data they can get their hands on without your consent.
For the non-Facebook users–which I am often tempted to become–Facebook will limit the data needed and kept if you’re invited to look at an event or something (for example your email address).
The best part of this? These changes are world-wide changes. Granted it will take a year to make changes to the application issues (which the Privacy Commissioner is fine with), the rest will start coming into play very shortly.
Chalk one up for Canada. We might be polite, but we know when to make a stink.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] changes he talks about weren’t driven by “changes in societal norms”, rather Facebook getting called to the carpet by the Canadian privacy commissioner and having to mend their ….I agree that a lot of what was once “private” is now public. In some ways this is good, [...]