This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

New Zealand’s privacy commissioner has accused Facebook of breaking the country’s privacy laws and has deleted his account on the site.

John Edwards released a scathing criticism of the social media giant, accusing it of breaching privacy laws after it refused to release personal information held about the accounts of other Facebook users.

Writing on the website the Spinoff, Edwards said that when his office had issued Facebook with a statutory demand to produce the information, the company said it was not subject to the New Zealand Privacy Act, and was therefore under no obligation to provide it.

Cambridge Analytica sets quandary for right: hate Facebook, love Trump Read more

A statement from the Edwards’ office said Facebook was “subject to the Privacy Act and had fundamentally failed to engage with the act”.

But Facebook has hit back at the commissioner’s findings, saying the request for information had been refused because it was “overly broad” and “intrusive”.

“We are disappointed that the New Zealand privacy commissioner asked us to provide access to a year’s worth of private data belonging to several people and then criticised us for protecting their privacy,” a spokeswoman for the company said.

“We scrutinise all requests to disclose personal data, particularly the contents of private messages, and will challenge those that are overly broad.

“We have investigated the complaint from the person who contacted the commissioner’s office but we haven’t been provided enough detail to fully resolve it.”

While acknowledging that beyond naming Facebook he was essentially powerless to force the company to hand over information, Edwards raised the spectre of a legal challenge.

He said he would “continue to assert that Facebook is obliged to comply with New Zealand law in relation to personal information it holds and uses in relation to its New Zealand users”.

He wrote: “And in due course a case may come before the courts, either through my office, or at the suit of the company.”

“Every New Zealander has the right to find out what information an agency holds about them,” he said, adding: “It is a right of constitutional significance, and even this week’s Dotcom case noted that the right of individuals to access, challenge and to correct personal data is generally regarded as ‘perhaps the most important privacy protection safeguard’.” .

His ruling comes in the context of increasing international scrutiny of Facebook after revelations that the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained information about 50 million of the company’s users to target US voters with political ads and other personalised posts based on their psychological profile in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.