Let’s add bite to the bark
Official Canada sometimes likes to talk tough about Facebook and the other digital giants. But when it comes to actually doing something about their abuses of power, it’s a lot of bark and not much bite.
We saw another example of that this past week when the federal Competition Bureau announced that Facebook will pay millions of dollars to settle a complaint that it misled hundreds of thousands of Canadians about how it handled their personal information.
“Canadians expect and deserve truth from businesses in the digital economy,” Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell declared emphatically. “The Competition Bureau will not hesitate to crack down on any business that makes false or misleading claims to Canadians about how they use personal data.”
Sounds impressive. But a closer look at what “crack down” actually means here shows that Canada’s laws fall far short of what’s needed to confront the global tech companies’ vast reach and power to shape the marketplace.
In the end, under an agreement between the Competition Bureau and Facebook, the company will pay a total of $9.5 million — $9 million to settle the bureau’s complaint that it misled some 620,000 Canadians about how it handled their personal data, plus $500,000 toward the bureau’s own costs.
By Canadian standards, that’s a lot. It’s close to the maximum penalty of $10 million for making false or misleading claims under Canada’s Competition Act. And it prohibits Facebook from misleading users about disclosure of personal data.
But compared to the sheer scale of Facebook’s world-wide business, or the kind of fines levied by other countries, the money the company must pay is a pittance.
In the first three months of this year alone, the social-media giant recorded net income (profit) of $4.9 billion U. S., or $6.8 billion Canadian, on revenues of $17.7 billion U.S. Its profit was up an astonishing 102 per cent over the same period last year.
That means it’ll take Facebook just half a day to make back the money it’s agreed to pay in order to satisfy the Competition Bureau.
Compare that with the $5-billion penalty that Facebook agreed to pay last year to settle a similar complaint by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Both the Canadian and U.S. investigations followed revelations that Cambridge Analytica misused data from Facebook users for political purposes.
We’ve been down this road before. Just over a year ago the federal and British Columbia privacy commissioners concluded that Facebook had indeed violated Canadian users’ privacy, and issued a stern rebuke to the company.
But the the federal commissioner didn’t actually have any power to make Facebook follow his recommendations to fix the problem. He had to go to Federal Court to seek permission to levy a fine —which under Canadian law could not exceed $100,000.
At the time, we calculated that Facebook makes that much in under a minute. Given that its profits have doubled since then, by now it could better be calculated in seconds.
All this lays bare how feeble Canada’s laws are when it comes to dealing with the global digital behemoths that affect so much of our lives. And that, in turn, underlines how far Canada lags other countries in coming to terms with this challenge.
Privacy laws and fines are just one small part. Far bigger is the lack of political will to stand up to Facebook, Google and the rest. While other countries are acting, Canada is still dragging its feet.
The most pressing example now is the need to stop letting the digital giants get away with not paying taxes on the billions in revenue they extract from Canadians. And to make them share their advertising revenues with Canadian media companies — revenues they earn from content created by Canadian journalists.
Canada keeps talking about these issues while other countries are moving ahead and actually dealing with them. When it comes to Facebook and the rest, it’s time for more bite along with the bark.