Alex Reid

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) filed a complaint with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to review what the CIPPIC says are various violations of Canadian privacy law (22 in all), making Facebook “a minefield of privacy invasion.”

One of the most serious questions that users have long been asking is why users can’t delete their accounts. Facebook users can only “suspend” their accounts, leaving their information intact on Facebook’s servers.

Read their full complaint here (PDF).

The CBC reports that the provincial Liberals in PEI (the majority) quietly scrapped its alternative energy efficiency loan program two months after it was introduced.

Winnipeg based company Sidetrack has signed a deal with the LA Metro Transportation Authority (Metro) to display LED adverts along one of its subway connections.

The LED advertising system is composed of 360 digital strips that light up at timed intervals as the train passes the tunnel wall very much like a flip book, forming a smooth?flowing video.

In the two-year agreement, the Metro will make $240,000 a year with no cost to the Metro. SideTrack pays for all the equipment and maintenance, but stands to make 3-4 times that considering that the 18 fifteen-second ads will cost over $50,000 each.

Sidetrack says it plans on reaching subway users in Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Washington within the next couple years.

Facebook is citing privacy concerns in a blog post about blocking Google’s Friend Connect.

Friend Connect is essentially a way to auto-generate code to insert “gagdets” (think “widgets”) as well as third party includes. An include might have been, until now, your Facebook friend list or iLike music list in a box on the side of your web site. The idea is to “socially enable” web sites; that is, to integrate social networking aspects with an individual’s web sites.

The more obvious problem is that so far in this new Google roll-out is that it only integrates two small-namers Hi5 and Plaxo, as well as Orkut which Google owns, along with it’s own Google Talk and Facebook, via its own web site. Google would have you believe it’s ‘making social networks social’, but it’s hardly tapping the wide range of social networking sites out there.

The real problem however is that Facebook was working on the exact same thing, only to announce it three days later; Facebook Connect. Facebook’s incarnation of the same name was to integrate only Facebook and Digg (which is far bigger than Google’s choices, combined) into individual’s web sites.

The bigger issue here is that Facebook is being careful with Google as it gears up to compete with them as it’s becoming apparent Google is missing the social networking aspect to their empire.

But yes, it’s “privacy concerns”.

From CTV:

Professor Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, told CTV’s Canada AM on Monday that Insite, the five-year-old safe-injection site, has not had a negative impact on its community.

“We looked at crime rates in the area surrounding Insite, and we talked to business operators, we talked to service providers, to police, to residents in the surrounding vicinity. We found, overwhelmingly, people had very positive sentiments,” Boyd said.