The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario recently released a brochure entitled "When Online Gets Out of Line: Privacy - Make an Informed Online Choice." Our colleagues in Ontario partnered with the social networking site Facebook in releasing this brochure. Our Office fully supports this initiative and believes this to be an opportunity to bring awareness to this very important issue.

High school, college and university students are logging on to an ever-growing array of social networking sites with thousands of new accounts opened each day. The purpose of the brochure is to encourage students to carefully consider their privacy options when creating profiles on social networking sites. While protecting users' personal information is key, promoting responsibility through the making of informed choices by online users is also an important goal.

Some of the issues covered in this brochure include identifying social networking sites with weak privacy controls, and the intrinsic risks involved in using them. Since users create personal profiles, typically containing photos and lists of interests, along with other detailed profile data, the section: What Choices Do You Have?, is where students should begin. As users post and/or import their own notes (blogs) and photos, people tags and comments, another section identifies some of the protections students should be aware of when posting their personal information online, such as being able to control access to one's profile and being able to block access to specific information, if so desired.

You may view an electronic version of the brochure at //www.ipc.on.ca/docs/facebook-ipc.pdf or through the Resources Link on our website at www.oipc.gov.nl.ca. In addition, copies are available at this Office.

Media contact:
Sandy Hounsell
Executive Director
709-729-6309
1-877-729-6309