PERSON OF THE YEAROriginally uploaded by jjessalo.


So, imagine you are a student spending your summer working for the Ontario government. You are pretty excited to have successfully survived the interview process to land a cool summer job and are thrilled that your boss is Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips of the Ontario government. So you arrive at work on Wednesday, log into Facebook to let your roommate know where you want to go for dinner and you see the following message: “access denied”. You check to make sure that you are logging into Facebook and not some banned site and try again seeing the same message.

This act was replayed through Ontario government offices on Wednesday as Facebook access was restricted according to the Toronto Star.

“The Internet website that you have requested has been deemed unacceptable for use for government business purposes,” the warning reads.

Facebook joins YouTube, online poker gambling websites and hardcore sex sites as verboten in any provincial government office across Ontario, said Government Services Minister Gerry Phillips.

But similar rival MySpace is still accessible to provincial government employees at work.

It is unclear why the government is taking this stance and specifically focusing on Facebook.

Facebook chief privacy officer Chris Kelly pointed out the company did a brochure on Internet safety issues for students last October with the prov- ince’s privacy commissioner.

“We’re puzzled by why governments would ban access to Facebook,” said Kelly, based at its corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, California, who was in Toronto on business unrelated to the ban.

“We’re concerned about this because we think it’s taking a tool away from users, a very powerful tool,” he said, noting Facebook has made “preliminary contact” with Ontario officials to rectify the situation.

“We hope that the usefulness of the tool shines through.”

More than 2 million Facebook users exist in Canada, making it the fastest growing market for the website, increasing at a rate of 5 per cent a week. Toronto alone has more than 500,000 registered users.

So what do people do that can no longer access Facebook on their computers. Well, they pull out their Blackberries and mobile phones and access Facebook there. The government hasn’t banned those yet, have they?

Relevance: This is the first instance I have been aware of in which a government in North America has banned access to Facebook at its workplace.

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