By Lizz Bottrell, Citizen Staff

With millions of users on Facebook, the new social networking trend is hard to ignore. Everyone from young kids to grandparents hold Facebook accounts, making it one of the most popular places to keep in touch with friends and family. But Facebook comes at a price, a person’s privacy.

Although Facebook seems to give users the option of setting their privacy so that only specified people can see their personal page, it doesn’t generally work that way.

Recently, a group of law students interning at the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, alleged over 20 violations against Facebook under Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The students state that Facebook is breaking the law when it passes on sensitive personal information to advertisers and other profit-making companies without securing meaningful consent.

For example, when a user adds a third party application, he or she has no choice but to allow the third party complete access to his or her private information. If that’s not enough to get someone a little irritated, Facebook uses the information users voluntarily put up on their pages to advertise directly to them. For instance, if a user writes rap music under musical interests, Facebook advertisers splash flashy advertisements for rap musicians all over the user’s page.

Another huge issue with Facebook comes into play when a user attempts to delete his or her user account. Actually, it’s quite frustrating trying to permanently delete an account. Facebook gives users the opportunity to deactivate their accounts, leaving all the personal information in Facebook’s hands, but the site does not give users the option of completely deleting their accounts. In order for a user to fully rid his or herself of the Facebook world, he or she must commit what Facebook naysayers are calling “Facebook suicide.” The user must go in and manually delete everything from his or her account - this includes interests, personal information and friends - all which can be a very tedious task.

Of course Facebook denies all these allegations, trying to pin all the blame on users who voluntarily share this information. Okay, maybe they have us there, or so they think. In order for that to be true, they would have to take into account all the Facebook users who don’t fully understand how it works. I didn’t even understand how much personal information they sold to other companies until recently. That’s right, Facebook sells users’ personal information for lots and lots of money to interested advertisers.

The more a person looks into Facebook, the more crooked it seems. Keep in mind that it’s not just Facebook who’s taking a user’s information for an inappropriate purpose. There are a lot of cybercreepers out there who love to know every bit of information about a person. This can become especially dangerous when minors are involved.

As for now, until the commissioner assigned to the Facebook allegations makes a decision as to whether or not Facebook is breaking privacy laws, chances are, everything will remain the same. So Facebook lovers, fear not, your Facebook account is not going anywhere. Just remember to think about whether sharing all your personal information with complete strangers who plan to use it against you is really worth being able waste time at work on Facebook. Maybe it’s time to connect with friends and family with a phone call or a visit, an activity which is a little more personal and promises not to use all your dirty little secrets against you.