An article out of the UK this morning reports that the U.S. FBI is considering the development of an international database in collaboration with the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada which could potentially make personal information – biometric data like iris, palm and finger prints – of its citizens instantly available to police forces in other partner countries. The U.S.-led program, called “Server in the Sky”, would aid forces in tracking down major criminals and suspected terrorists.
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Increasingly, we are putting our personal information online in order to gain access to the benefits of Web 2.0: We list and rank our favourite books on vendor sites, and in return we get recommendations for books we might never have heard of otherwise. We indicate which high school we attended on our Facebook profiles, and in return we reconnect with long-lost friends.
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The Pew Internet & American Life Project released its report on Teens and Social Media last month, which found that an overwhelming majority of American teens are using the Internet for social interaction – namely, sharing creations likes photos and videos, telling stories, and interacting with others.
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As we close out 2007, we’d like to sound a note of caution for privacy rights in Canada. We are lucky to have a variety of protections for personal information and data at the territorial, provincial and federal levels. Nevertheless, the Commissioner took a moment last week to highlight some of the steps that need to be taken by individuals, corporations and the government in the face of continuing challenges:
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In Britain, the National Consumer Council and Childnet have released the results of an extensive series of surveys and interviews with children, youth and their parents. Their work sheds some light into these groups’ activities online, including participation on youth-oriented websites, how they react to advertising aimed at children and youth, and their attitudes towards privacy.
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Several months ago, while we were brainstorming possible subjects for blog posts and holiday season features, we thought “Santa suffers a catastrophic data loss” would be a pretty funny and relevant item for the Office to cover.
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Today, we’d like to present an excerpt from a recent blog post from Alison Black, titled “respecting digital privacy.”
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Earlier this fall, we discussed the challenge delivered by Secretary Chertoff at the 29th International Conference: he argued that privacy rights must be balanced off against a country’s security needs.
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This week, we’ve been speaking to the mediaFootnote 1 about an incident at the Passport Office: a person using their online application form found that they could access others’ personal documents by changing one variable in the URL displayed in their browser. The Globe and Mail and Slashdot report that this was likely the result of an error in the code behind the web page – or an omission in the code.
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In case you missed it, last night the CBS News program 60 Minutes discussed the data breach at TJX (also known as TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Winners and Home Sense). Our report on the data breach can be found on our site. Further to our report, TJX announced they had, in fact, lost the information for 90 million cards.
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