On October 6, 2015, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) released a judgment invalidating an important Commission Decision 2000/520 which was validating the EU-US Safe Harbour Principles. Why is this an important issue? Pursuant to Directive 95/46/EC, EU Member States are required to provide that the transfer of personal data from Europe to […] Read more
I will be presenting on De-identification around the World, at the Privacy, Security, Risk 2015, presented by the IAPP Privacy Academy and CSA Congress, in Las Vegas, on October 1, 2015. My co-panelists are Phil Lee, Head of US Office, Fieldfisher and Andrew Reiskind, Deputy CPO, MasterCard. All around the world, personal information is defined in a wide […] Read more
Online merchants can offer each website customer a different price given that it can recognise such customer through the use of a cookie and can therefore categorise the customer based on other information (previous purchases, etc.). Many regard price discrimination as unfair or manipulative and I have already blogged about this issue a while back: Dynamic pricing […] Read more
I came across an article today about the Apple Store now selling drones. These devices are more commonly used by individuals, as well as from private sector and public sector entities although under each scenario, the privacy issues are obviously quite different. Personal drone Recent stories about unfriendly neighbours and drones have been circulating. On […] 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
I recently published a blog post on the topic of Is taking someone’s picture in public breaching their privacy? I have since received many questions pertaining to whether using or publishing someone’s Facebook profile information could be considered as breaching their privacy. Facebook users post information and pictures about themselves and their loved ones as […] Read more
It was announced yesterday that the Federal Court of Canada has certified the privacy class-action lawsuit involving 40,000 people which pertains to the medical marijuana access program. The case was launched in 2013 after Health Canada sent letters to people with the program’s name on the envelope. The envelope containing the letter explicitly identified the “Marihuana Medical Access Program” in […] Read more
I came across an article yesterday in which the Ottawa police is saying that filming women in public is not necessarily illegal. While it may be true that nothing prohibits filming or taking someone’s picture in public, in some jurisdictions, it may be illegal to publish / post the picture or movie online without that person’s prior […] Read more
When managing access rights, organisations should take note that while the access right has to be provided for free, it is possible for an organisation to charge a reasonable amount for a copy (photocopy) of the documents requested. What is considered a “reasonable amount”? A local paper reported yesterday a recent case (June 2015) in which the […] Read more
I recently summarized the state of recent privacy class actions in Canada: the cases that are either pending or which were recently authorized. There has recently been an update in the Condon v. Canada case, which pertains to an action taken following the announcement in late 2012 that Human Resources and Skills Development Canada had lost an […] Read more