At any rate, what is very important is that she saw they were monitoring her Facebook accounts, so she came to us. We went to the departments, who said, “Well, of course. This is public. She posted it on Facebook.” They were not being mischievous at all. They were acting in good faith, yet we came to the conclusion that they were violating the Privacy Act, because section 4 of the Privacy Act says that you cannot collect personal information that is not related to your activities or programs, and this was not related to their activities or programs. They replied, “But it's not personal information. She put it up on Facebook.”
The crucial question at this time of technology is “What is personal information on the net?” This has been clarified in R. v. Spencer, 2014, by the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled that personal information on the net is not public. It remains personal because personal information is any information about an identifiable individual. Hence, the posts that Ms. Blackstock was sharing with her Facebook audience were personal information that she had not intended for the government, and that the government could not justify to pick up or collect as related to its mandate—either Justice or Aboriginal Affairs—and therefore it had violated the act.