Two users of Facebook have filed law suit to seek for damages on behalf of over six hundred thousand Canadians whose personal data may have been illegally used for political purposes.
The class-action lawsuit filed by residents of Calgary, Saul Benary and Karma Holoboff demands that the Federal Court order Facebook to fortify its security so as to better protect sensitive information and abide by federal privacy law.
The suit also seeks $1,000 for each of the roughly 622,000 Canadians whose information was sent to others via a digital app.
In April 2019, Privacy Commissioner, Daniel Therrien alongside his British Columbia counterpart, Michael McEvoy, unveiled a lot of major shortcomings in the procedures of Facebook and requested for stronger laws to safeguard Canadians.
The investigation followed reports that Facebook permitted an outside organization use an app to gain access to personal information of users and shared some of the data with other.
Those who received the information included Cambridge Analytica, a firm that was involved in United States political campaigns.
According to Therrien and McEvoy, the app, which at one point was called “This is Your Digital Life,” motivated users to partake in a personality quiz but gathered a lot of information about those that installed the app and data about their Facebook friends.
The report said around 300,000 Facebook users globally added the app and that led to the potential extraction of personal information of about 87 million others which include some 622,000 Canadians.
The commissioners came into conclusion that Facebook violated Canada’s privacy law that govern companies by not obtaining logical and meaningful consent of users of app and their friends, and that the social media giant had “inadequate safeguards” to guard user information.
In spite of its public acknowledgment of a “major breach of trust” in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook debunked the report’s findings and the commissioners said their recommendations were not implemented by the company.
That prompted Therrien to launch his own Federal Court action in February and requested that a judge declare that Facebook contravened Canadian privacy law.
Facebook reacted and asked a judge to toss out the finding of the watchdog that the social media giant’s negligence permitted the use of personal data for political purposes.
Facebook has said repeatedly that there is no proof that data of Canadian users was shared with Cambridge Analytica.
In their class-action lawsuit, Benary and Holoboff revealed Facebook informed them in April 2018 that their information “had been disclosed to Cambridge Analytica without their consent.”
The two lodged a complaint in Therrien’s office in respect of the improper collection and disclosure of their data.
In October 2019, Benary and Holoboff were informed by the commissioner that they were entitled to pursue their complaints in Federal Court.
The notice of application however requests that the court certify the action as a class proceeding and proclaim that Facebook was obliged to protect their information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.
Facebook has not responded in court to the class-action application. Also, the social media giant did not immediately make comment on the filing.
