Peter Waldkirch is a second year LL.B. student at the University of Ottawa. The Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddard, recently released her office's Annual Report to Parliament on the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Several press outlets have covered the report. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's (OPC) press […]
Virgil Cojocaru is a JD candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. You are shopping online, surfing on Blockbuster. The next day one of your friends on Facebook messages you, “hey Dave, nice choice in movies!” What has just happened here? Some might argue this is just amicable banter between close friends. Others might quickly point […]
Three years ago, Netflix released a database containing the movie preferences of 480,000 users. Last year, Google released information on the viewing habits of millions of YouTube users to Viacom. In both of these and many other similar cases, the data was anonymized first---fields containing personally identifying information were removed. According to a paper by […]
In response to the complaint against Bell Sympatico (Bell) by the Canadian Internet policy and Public Interest Clinic, based at the University of Ottawa, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner produced a report of findings dated August 13, 2009. The complaint launched under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) alleged 1) that […]
This blog post reports on the report of findings made by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) against a US-based company called Accusearch, Inc., operating as Abika.com (Abika) for collecting and disclosing data on Canadian residents without their knowledge and consent. This decision is noteworthy since it recognizes the harm done to […]
Google knows what I'm doing 88% of the time. I've voluntarily given Facebook details of many aspects about my personal, work and school lives. These two companies probably know more about me than I do. And I'm not scared. I doubt Mark Zuckerberg will be emailing a---hypothetical, I assure you---compromising photo from my Facebook profile […]
The recent announcement of Yahoo and Microsoft's partnership may mean more choice and transparency for consumers, advertisers and publishers. It certainly means more competition in the world of online search and advertisements. Carol Bartz of Yahoo and Steven A. Ballmer of Microsoft finally put pen to paper on Wednesday, July 29, 2009, to announce this […]
Stephen Sharon is a recent graduate of Touro Law School in New York where he focused on intellectual property. Stephen was also the first place winner of the Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition sponsored by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) for his submission of a case study about the legal battle between […]
Does Google know what you're doing online? Eighty-eight percent of the time, the answer might be yes. Earlier this month a group of graduate students at UC Berkeley released a detailed report on the extent of online tracking and the disconnect between reality and user expectations. The data in the report was collected from various […]
Consider the following scenario: The sales team at a large software company is meeting with a particularly hot prospect and is hoping to seal the deal on a big sale of Product X. Things have been going great, but right in the middle of the meeting someone pulls out a printout of a message board […]