RBC faces privacy probe

TORONTO • Canada’s privacy commissioner is looking into complaints about whether social media giant Facebook Inc. gave Royal Bank of Canada access to private information of users.

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is investigating people’s complaints over Royal Bank’s “alleged role in receiving information from Facebook,” Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien said in Ottawa last week in a Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

“We received two complaints against Facebook in relation to the alleged sharing of users’ private messages with ‘partners’,” Valerie Lawton, spokeswoman for privacy commissioner’s office, said in an email Friday. “One of those complaints referenced certain of those partners, including RBC, with whom they may have shared those messages.”

The issue stems back to a payments feature Royal Bank developed and offered customers between 2013 and 2015, allowing them to transfer money through Facebook’s messaging system.

“The Office of the Privacy Commissioner confirmed that RBC is not under investigation in this matter,” bank spokesman AJ Goodman said in an email. “RBC spoke with the OPC in January about how this service worked but that discussion was not part of a formal investigation into RBC.”

Royal Bank’s internal dealings with Facebook surfaced in December in internal correspondence published online by U.K. lawmakers. RBC was also named in a Dec. 19 New York Times report as one of more than 150 companies that were given access to Facebook users’ personal data. Facebook published a statement that said its partnerships or features didn’t give companies access to information without people’s permission, and Royal Bank said separately at the time it didn’t have the ability to see user messages.