Facebook Inc. will pay $9 million as part of a settlement with the Competition Bureau about misleading claims the company made regarding privacy controls on the social networking platform.
According to a news release from the Bureau, Facebook gave a false impression that users could control who could access their personal information, but that personal information was made available to third-party developers anyway.
The news release from the Bureau also says, “Facebook also allowed certain third-party developers to access the personal information of users’ friends after users installed certain third-party applications. While Facebook made claims that it would no longer allow such access to the personal information of users’ friends after April 30, 2015, the practice continued until 2018 with some third-party developers.”
While the news release doesn’t mention the Cambridge Analytica scandal directly, the issue of third-party developers using applications to gain access to users’ personal information was at the heart of a controversy which came to light in 2018.
Cambridge Analytica was accused of obtaining data scraped from Facebook using a research application, and then using that data to create psychological profiles of users, in an attempt to target ads and influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the United Kingdom Brexit referendum.
In an emailed statement to the Financial Post, a spokesperson for Facebook said the company is not admitting it did anything wrong.
“Although we do not agree with the Commissioner’s conclusions, we are resolving this matter by entering into a consent agreement and not contesting the conclusions for the purposes of this agreement,” the emailed statement said. “We look forward to continuing our productive relationship with the Commissioner and the Competition Bureau. We will build on the improvements we’ve made in protecting people’s information and how we communicate about the privacy controls Canadians can use.”
Financial Post
• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: jamespmcleod
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
