Canadian Privacy Commissioner Says Public Profiles Are Private

On June 12, 2018, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner ("OPC") ¹ released its report ² into Profile Technology Ltd.'s ("Profile Technology") use of "publicly available" Facebook profiles. The OPC concluded that Profile Technology had not obtained the necessary consents from individuals whose Facebook profiles they were collecting for the purposes of establishing its own social networking website. The case is an important one since it sheds light on what limits may be imposed by Canadian privacy regulators on the use of personal information that may be available to the public from time-to-time on social networking platforms.

Background

Profile Technology, a New Zealand-based company, had been retained by Facebook in 2007 to provide advanced search functions for its site. Specifically, it indexed the public parts of users' profiles – in a manner that is similar to how Google and other search engines index information on the internet more broadly. To this end,