Some of us from the Office attended the MESH Conference in Toronto last month, jumping at the chance to hear a number of thought leaders and innovators in media, technology and society. Privacy, data protection and reputation management were subjects discussed in several of the sessions, but two video clips are available that demonstrate how online users can have wildly different approaches to privacy and the protection of personal information.
Read moreStarting today, young people can turn to youthprivacy.ca, an interactive web site that offers advice about how youth can protect their personal information and take charge of how their identity is being shaped online.
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Two pictures taken during a Net Neutrality rally on Parliament Hill last week.
Read moreThe author of a new article on surveillance in The Walrus thinks you do. Hal Niedzviecki says that while the thought of being monitored used to disturb us (think George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four), cameras and other surveillance techniques are so prevalent today that we’ve stopped noticing them. And, he says, when we do notice we don’t really care (case in point: when it was announced that 10,000 cameras would be installed in Toronto’s subways, streetcars and buses, he asserts that citizens “shrugged and went about their business”).
Read moreSeveral Canadian universities, including Queen’s and the University of Victoria, recently launched a multi-disciplinary study on the sociological and cultural impacts of surveillance. “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” received $2.5 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Read moreThe social networking site Facebook has been under scrutiny lately for lax security with its applications feature. Applications in Facebook are created by third-party software developers and are run on third-party servers. These applications can take many forms – a quiz, a game, or just another way to reach out to friends – but the common feature in all is that they allow software developers to access Facebook users’ personal data.
Read moreThey are, according to one of London’s top police officers. In an interview with The Guardian, Mick Neville, head of New Scotland Yard’s Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office, says that even though Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe, CCTV cameras have, so far, helped solve just three per cent of street robberies in London.
Read moreLast week, Al Kamen of the Washington Post published an ironic article lightly criticizing his Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff about his statement that fingerprints aren’t personal information.
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The Privacy Act, the federal privacy law requiring federal government bodies to respect individual privacy rights, hasn’t been substantially updated since 1982 – the same year the Commodore 64 was released and we stopped calling July 1 Dominion Day. What’s interesting about these changes is they could be implemented immediately and relatively easily – and the benefit to Canadians would be a privacy law that is modern, responsive and efficient.
Read moreLast week, the Seattle Times reported on an experiment the University of Washington is conducting with radio frequency identification, or RFID. The university, responsible for one of the largest experiments using wireless tags in a social setting, has effectively created a futuristic atmosphere where RFID is everywhere. With this in place, they hope to uncover problems before the technology becomes widely adopted.
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