HOUSE OF COMMONS
CHAMBRE DES COMMUNES
CANADA

Commissioner Daniel Therrien

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada
30 Victoria St.

Gatineau, QC K1A 1H3

March 19, 2018
Re: Facebook data breach by Cambridge Analytica
Dear Commissioner Therrien,

Over the weekend, the troubling news emerged that Cambridge Analytica, a firm owned by hedge fund
billionaire Robert Mercer and linked to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, was able to access
tens of millions of Facebook users? private data without their consent for use in modelling
for political purposes. Further, news outlets reported that Facebook had known about this breach since
2015, but had not informed its users about it. The reaction of Facebook?s executives to this enormous
breach of its users? privacy has been incredibly cavalier, considering both its scope and the lingering
concerns around the role of digital skullduggery in the recent American presidential election and
information warfare in elections across the globe.

In an era of globalized data and global online platforms, Canadians should be concerned by this
nonchalant attitude towards user privacy by one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.

In particular, we request that your office broadly examine Facebook's compliance with the Personal
Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) to ensure that Canadian Facebook users?
information has not been compromised and that Facebook is taking measures adequate to protect

Canadians? private data in the future.

There is significant international attention about this troubling breach. The British Information
Commissioner and a committee of the House of Commons in the United Kingdom are investigating it, as
is the European Parliament, and an American state government and US Senator have called for both
investigations and tougher standards. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have referred to the
legislative and regulatory vacuum around the behaviour of the emerging platform monopolies as a ?Wild
West.?

 
 
  

As Members of Parliament, we will also be calling for a Parliamentary investigation into this breach, as
well as a broader review of the practices of large tech and media platforms with regard to user privacy,

data storage, and market competition.

The largest companies have acted as defacto utilities of the information age, and it is time that they

were subjected to appropriate scrutiny and oversight.

Sincerely,



Charlie Angus, MP
Timmins?James Bay
NDP Ethics Critic

 

Matthew Dub?, MP
Beloeil?Chambly
NDP Public Safety Critic

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Brian Masse, MP

Windsor West

NDP Innovation, Science and
Economic Development Critic