{"id":548822,"date":"2026-03-20T10:51:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548822\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T10:51:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:51:15","slug":"supreme-court-of-canada-reserves-decision-on-landmark-facebook-data-harvesting-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/548822\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court of Canada reserves decision on landmark Facebook data-harvesting case"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Supreme Court of Canada is delaying its ruling on a landmark privacy case involving Facebook’s role in the 2010s Cambridge Analytica scandal.<\/p>\n

The top bench reserved its decision following a one-day hearing on Thursday in Ottawa that focused on whether the social media company obtained meaningful consent from users before collecting, using and disclosing their personal information with third-party apps. <\/p>\n

It also examined whether the tech giant did enough to safeguard the data of its users.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“What Facebook needs to get consent for is the disclosure by what I’ll call an installing user to an app,” said Michael Feder, counsel for the social media company.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“What the app does \u2014 that’s not Facebook’s business.”<\/p>\n

\"TheThe Supreme Court of Canada has taken Facebook’s appeal under advisement. (Justin Tang\/The Canadian Press)<\/p>\n

The social media company is seeking an appeal of a 2024 Federal Court of Appeal ruling that found Facebook Inc. (Facebook’s parent company now known as Meta) broke federal privacy law for failing to sufficiently inform users of risks to their data.<\/p>\n

The appeal court’s decision overturned a 2023 Federal Court judgment that came to the opposite conclusion.<\/p>\n

“This is about making sure that people can engage in social media in a way in which they have control,” said Colleen Bauman, representing the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.<\/p>\n

The privacy commissioner opened an investigation into Facebook after receiving a complaint in 2019 concerning the tech giant’s compliance with the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.<\/p>\n

The office concluded Facebook breached the act.<\/p>\n

Case should prompt overdue changes: professor<\/p>\n

David Fraser, a Halifax-based lawyer at McInnes Cooper who specializes in privacy law, said the case could impact how companies obtain consent and manage data in Canada.<\/p>\n

“This has implications, for example, for the [Apple] App Store,” Fraser said.<\/p>\n

“What responsibility does Apple have to supervise every one of the thousands, if not millions, of apps on its platform?”<\/p>\n

WATCH | More about the case:\"\"<\/p>\n

Supreme Court of Canada hears privacy law case over Facebook\u2019s Cambridge Analytica data scandal<\/p>\n

In 2018, British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica was caught harvesting data from Facebook users \u2014 including those in Canada. Now, Canada’s top court is hearing a case over whether Facebook violated the country’s privacy law.<\/p>\n

The case stems from the decade-old Cambridge Analytica data scandal, in which the British political consulting firm improperly harvested personal data from approximately 87 million Facebook users for political advertising without their consent.<\/p>\n

Data was gathered not only from those who used the firm’s quiz app, but from their network of Facebook friends as well.<\/p>\n

Facebook estimates more than 600,000 Canadians were affected.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It is crazy that a case that’s more than a decade in the making, that’s been addressed by so many other countries, still lingers in Canada,” said University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist.<\/p>\n

“We need certainty in Canadian privacy law. We need penalties in Canadian privacy law.”<\/p>\n

Geist said the case highlights how Canadian privacy law is largely broken. He said the onus is on Parliament to make legislative changes before a judgment is issued, which could take at least several months.<\/p>\n

“The case already should pressure the government,” Geist said. “It is long overdue for Canada to update privacy rules that are now more than 25 years old.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 3 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":548823,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-548822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548822\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/548823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}