Once again, folks from the Office attended “Canada’s web conference”, MESH 2009, in Toronto – a place where flacks, marketers, hackers, people with money to spend, people looking for money, and activists gather and talk about how the web is “affecting media, marketing, business and society as a whole”.
Read moreSpeaking at the Canadian Bar Association Conference earlier this week, the Privacy Commissioner talked about the privacy implications of courts and administrative tribunals posting to the web decisions and other documents containing personal information.
Read moreLast week, after months of speculation from critics and the media, the Minister of Industry unveiled new amendments to Canada’s intellectual property law, the Copyright Act. Previous attempts to revamp the legislation in 2005 dropped off the radar when Parliament went into election mode. This largely extinguished public debate of the bill, which Canada’s privacy champions had spoken out against. At the time, the privacy commissioners of Canada, Ontario and British Columbia all expressed similar concern over the government’s direction.
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 moreBBC Radio 4 has a series of radio documentaries on Britain’s control rooms and surveillance systems…with a twist. In “Invisible People”, urban historian Joe Kerr interviews the people who work in these control centres about their jobs, tapping into the human side of Britain’s surveillance society.
Read moreThe reform of Canada’s Copyright Act has been a long and contentious process. We have long held that particular aspects of the copyright debate – and digital rights management technologies (DRM) in particular – could have an impact on the privacy of Canadians.
Read more“We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”
Read moreAn 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.
Read moreAs 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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