Blog

Child sweepers share observations on web/mobile app privacy

It’s back to school!

Looking for ways to kick the school year off right?

Mind the gap: Poll finds many Canadian businesses believe privacy is important but not taking basic steps to protect customer information

Ten years after Canada’s private sector privacy law came into full effect, our latest survey has found that many Canadian businesses are still not taking the basic steps necessary to protect the personal information of their customers and clients – despite believing that protecting privacy is “extremely important”.

An update on our Internet privacy sweep

Last month, we released the initial results of our Internet privacy sweep. You can read the original blog post to see what we observed. (We should note here that the screenshots and references in that blog post reflect what we saw online during the sweep and were still in place when we originally blogged about the sweep results on August 13.)

Initial results from our Internet Privacy Sweep: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

You might recall, a few weeks back our Office led and participated in the first annual Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN) Internet Privacy Sweep.

Fixing leaky faucets: Raising the bar of privacy protection

“Web leakage” research and follow-up work by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has resulted in improvements to the privacy practices of some popular Canadian websites.

A First-Person-Sweeper Perspective

Yesterday, our Office participated in the first ever international internet privacy sweep. An initiative of the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN), the sweep is a coordinated effort among a number of data protection agencies to address a particular privacy issue. This year’s sweep assessed transparency online.

Surveillance technologies and children

A complaint investigation about a daycare that offered webcam monitoring to parents caused us to consider the prevalence of high tech surveillance tools in the day-to-day lives of children. Specifically, we wondered how technical surveillance might affect kids’ feelings about privacy.

OPC launches new online complaint form

Canadians who are concerned that their privacy has been compromised now have another way to submit complaints to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). The Office has launched an online complaint form on its website. The form helps users compile and submit electronically all the information needed to properly file a privacy complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law, or under the Privacy Act, which applies to the federal public sector.