Legal Research

Privacy, Identity (and Facebook?)

By John Gregory

Here’s a quote from Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg:

You have one identity? The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly? Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity
[see, e.g., Michael Zimmer.org]

This seems to me to be another example of the insidious creep of ?expectations? away from privacy, so that to the extent that one?s expectations decline, so too do one?s legal rights. In that case the prominence that commentators like Mark Z are given, or give themselves, can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies (or self-filling bank accounts?).

In this respect note that s. 3 of PIPEDA, the purposes section, states that the act aims to govern:

. . . the collection, use and disclosure of personal information in a manner that recognizes the right of privacy of individuals with respect to their personal information and the need of organizations to collect, use or disclose personal information for purposes that a reasonable person would consider appropriate in the circumstances. [emphasis added]

It also seems to me that it is not true that having two identities for oneself shows lack of integrity, except by some technical definition of integrity as meaning unity. Using ?integrity? to mean ?honesty?, I think the statement is wrong. I may have a professional identity and a personal identity on Facebook that do not overlap. Whether I use the same name does not matter.

What do you think?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on June 12, 2010 (boomark / email).