On May 7, 2020, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) and the provincial and territorial Information and Privacy Commissioners issued a joint statement on privacy principles for contact tracing and similar apps. (Aside: yes, not to be… Read More ›
Privacy
Quebec court refuses to certify Equifax class action
It is proving difficult for plaintiffs to get a data breach class action certified in Quebec. The latest attempt in Li c. Equifax inc., 2019 QCCS 4340 fell flat. The Quebec Superior Court refused to certify a class action arising… Read More ›
Settlement of $2.25 million approved in breach of PIPEDA case
On October 16, 2019, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice approved a settlement in Haikola v. The Personal Insurance Company, 2019 ONSC 5982. The case arose out of a complaint that the insurer was inappropriately collecting credit scores as part… Read More ›
Genetic non-discrimination as a privacy issue
The Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal regarding the constitutionality of Canada’s Genetic Non-Discrimination Act (GNDA) on October 10, 2019. The GNDA was one of the rare private members’ bills to be passed by Parliament with support across… Read More ›
Does your cloud contract meet Canadian data breach standards?
Canada’s federal data breach reporting law has been in force for almost 6 months. Do the major multi-national cloud infrastructure as a service firms contractually commit to help their Canadian customers comply with data breach reporting obligations? Or, do they… Read More ›
News media denied participation in Google vs. Canada, for now
The Federal Court recently refused a request, made by CBC and a group of media organizations, to intervene in a case involving the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) and Google. The OPC brought a reference to the… Read More ›
Rights, remedies and the means to pursue them: Rouge Valley Health System case goes to appeal
Enthusiasts for the tort of intrusion upon seclusion as the new frontier for holding organizations and their employees to account for privacy-related wrongs were forced to step back and regroup after the Ontario Superior Court of Justice’s decision in Broutzas… Read More ›
Steering facial recognition regulation away from the product
The last few months have been interesting. Two of the leading purveyors of facial recognition technology (Microsoft and Amazon Web Services) have all but admitted that the technology is not yet suitable for unsupervised automated decision-making. Apparently, humans are still… Read More ›
Covert DNA data banks in Canada: Quebec Court of Appeal is split
“Is the state free to collect the DNA of persons under suspicion of criminal activity by tricking them into giving up their DNA, keeping those samples indefinitely and using them as they see fit, without any prior authorization and without… Read More ›
A “technical” violation counts under Illinois biometric law
A year ago, I wrote about how the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act set off a wave of private litigation in the United States. A key issue that was being litigated was whether a plaintiff could seek liquidated damages and… Read More ›
