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 ›
Privacy
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 ›
Problematic Ontario Pawnbrokers Act to be repealed
An interesting nugget in the Ford government’s recently introduced Bill 66, titled “Restoring Ontario’s Competitiveness Act, 2018” is Schedule 2, which repeals the Pawnbrokers Act. The repeal of the Pawnbrokers Act will end legislation that has, for more than 100… Read More ›
Possible purposes for a smart city public digital stewardship
Sidewalk Labs (a Google affiliate) asserted in a blog post accompanying its October 15, 2018 smart city draft governance proposal that the Sidewalk Toronto project at Quayside “can set a new model for responsible data use in cities – anchored… Read More ›
Security Breaches and PIPEDA – Answers to Questions You Asked
I was asked many questions by a very engaged audience prior to, during and after a 2018 LexisNexis Canada webinar on the new breach of security safeguards provisions of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). For the… Read More ›
