Episode
Facebook Inc. v. Privacy Commissioner of Canada (41538)
- Published
- Mar 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 11487
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Summary
On March 19, 2019, the respondent, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada received a complaint under s. 11(1) of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, S.C. 2000, c. 5 (“PIPEDA”) which raised concerns about the appellant Facebook’s compliance with the PIPEDA. The concerns were related to Facebook’s practice of sharing Facebook users’ personal information with third-party applications hosted on its platform. The complaint was filed in the context of reports related to a professor at the University of Cambridge, U.K., Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, who launched an application through Facebook’s Platform titled “thisisyourdigitallife” (“TYDL”) in November 2013. Presented to users as a personality quiz, Dr. Kogan could access the personal information of installing users and installing users’ friends. In December 2015, it was reported that user data obtained by TYDL was sold to a corporation named Cambridge Analytica and a related entity, Strategic Communication Laboratories Elections Ltd. (SCL), who, in turn, used the data purchased from Dr. Kogan to help their clients target political messaging to potential voters in the then upcoming presidential election in the United States. When TYDL was launched in 2013, it agreed to Facebook’s Platform Policy and Terms of Service. In 2014, Facebook issued a version 2 (v.2) of its communication protocol, Graph API, under which third party developers could no longer request permission to access installing users’ friends unless the app developer, through an expanded access to additional personal information request, can demonstrate that the data would be used to “enhance the user’s in-app experience”. The process for consideration of expanded access requests was introduced alongside Graph API v.2 as “App Review.” Although…