Canada’s privacy commissioner will contact Facebook to find out whether Canadians’ personal information was affected by its massive data leak. Canadian data expert Christopher Wylie has told media he helped found a company that helped Donald Trump’s campaign for U.S. president use the private information of more than 50 million Facebook users for political purposes.
Facebook now says political consultants never should have had access to the dataset and that it had quietly asked them to delete it. It apparently assumed that was done.
Facebook is under fire over abuse of the personal information of tens of millions of users. (James H. Collins/The Canadian Press/file photo)
Canada offers help
Politicians in the U.S. and the U.K. are furious and are threatening to call Facebook in to testify before legislative committees. Canada’s privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien says his office has offered to help an investigation already started by his counterpart in the U.K.
In a statement, Therrien says the “media reports of the use of personal information posted on Facebook for political purposes raise serious privacy concerns” and a determination of whether Canadians were affected “will help us determine possible next steps.”
Canada’s privacy law generally requires consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in the course of commercial activities. Therrien notes it does not apply to political parties. His office has studied the matter in the past and asked Parliament to consider regulating the collection, use and disclosure of personal information by political parties.
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