In its most recent report of findings entitled “Company’s re-use of millions of Canadian Facebook user profiles violated privacy law,” the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (the “OPC”) dealt with the often confusing issue of personal information that is publicly available and confirmed its view that Facebook profiles that are set to public are not considered “publicly […] Read more
The 2016 Brussels Privacy Symposium which took place last week (November 8th) is the first annual academic program jointly presented by the Brussels Privacy Hub of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). The all-day workshop is titled: Identifiability: Policy and Practical Solutions for Anonymization and Pseudonymization. Khaled El Emam, […] Read more
Two great U.S. privacy academics, Ira Rubinstein and Woodrow Hartzog, have released last week their article on anonymization and risk. They articulate the view that perfect anonymization of data sets has failed and that although the process of protecting individuals in shared information remains integral to privacy practice and policy, there is no clear direction for policy. Data protection […] Read more
Paul Ohm, Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of Colorado Law School, recently published an interesting article on “Sensitive Information”. He explains how every data protection law provides special protection for certain categories of “sensitive information,” such as health, sex, or financial information and how the concept of sensitive information is undertheorized. […] Read more
In May of this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued a groundbreaking decision for online privacy rights in Google Inc. v. Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos. The CJEU ruled that European Union citizens have the right to require the erasure of inadequate, irrelevant or outdated information from search engines, […] Read more
I recently published an article with Patrick Gingras on this topic. The article is entitled “Accéder ou ne pas accéder au matériel informatique de son employé, telle est la question” (which translates to: “To access or not to access its employees’ technological devices: That is the question”). The article is in French so I have summarized […] Read more