(OTTAWA) The Privacy Commissioner of Canada and some of his colleagues elsewhere in the world are urging the biggest social media companies to counter the massive extraction of personal data from their websites.

In a joint statement, Commissioner Philippe Dufresne and his counterparts from Australia, the United Kingdom and a dozen other countries say that this practice, known as “massive mining of personal data online”, poses a serious risk to user privacy.

They warn that personal information thus extracted has been used for targeted cyberattacks, identity theft, the creation of facial recognition databases, unauthorized collection of information by the police, unsolicited direct marketing and spam.

A 2021 investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada and three provincial watchdogs – Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia – found that Clearview AI’s retrieval of billions of images of people from the internet represented “mass surveillance of Canadians”.

The new joint statement is an initiative of the Task Force on International Law Enforcement Cooperation, established by the Global Privacy Assembly.

The declaration is signed by Mr. Dufresne and representatives of 11 other members of the assembly, including Mexico and China. It was communicated to the parent companies of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn, Weibo and X (formerly Twitter).

“International collaboration is essential to promote and protect the right to privacy in the digital world, as well as to address new challenges such as massive data mining, which poses a significant risk to the fundamental right to privacy,” said Commissioner Dufresne.

The document outlines several steps that social media companies and other websites that host publicly available personal information can take to reduce the risks.

Suggestions include assigning a team to monitor mining activities, or taking steps to detect bots and block IP addresses when mining activity is detected.