Privacy

By Daniel Therrien, Privacy Commissioner of Canada The pandemic has made clear the importance of science, data and technology in addressing a public health crisis and its many social and economic consequences. It has accelerated the digitization of our lives, moving more of our activities online in an effort to…

Apple is delaying a controversial new privacy feature it’s implementing with iOS 14 that will require developers ask users for permission to gather data and track them across mobile apps and websites on the iPhone and iPad, the company announced in a developer update posted Thursday. Apple originally intended to put…

A yearlong analysis of Facebook – Ad Library has revealed “significant systemic flaws” in the way the platform monitors and enforces its political ad rules, according to researchers at New York University. The issues were uncovered as part of the NYU team’s audit of the Ad Library between May 2018 and June…

The country needs to pass federal privacy legislation to establish a national standard for individual rights. Today, too many state laws exist, creating confusion and duplication. We need to create a national standard that would apply to all businesses and organizations. By not having a national standard, we miss the…

New Zealand’s privacy laws are changing with the Privacy Act 2020 due to come into effect on 1 December 2020. You’ve probably heard about the changes, including the introduction of a new privacy principle, but do you have a good grasp of what you will need to do to comply?…

The London Police Service used a provincial database containing the personal health records of people who tested positive for COVID-19 at one of the highest rates in Ontario, snooping on private medical information 10,475 times between April and July. Law enforcement gained the unprecedented power to access people’s personal medical information when…

With its announcement last week about a public consultation to “improving provincial privacy laws,” Ontario is signalling it’s willing to pass its own private sector privacy law, joining Quebec, B.C. and Alberta. Other than those three, the other provinces and territories accept the federal Personal Information Privacy and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA),…

Americans using digital services would gladly switch to companies that are more committed to data privacy and feel frustrated that they don’t have more control over their personal data, according to survey results shared exclusively with Axios. Why it matters: Entire tech empires are built on assembling detailed digital dossiers on…

Privacy has become all the more essential in the age of data exploitation. The way data and technology are now deployed means that our privacy is under increased threat  and on a scale that we couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago, outside of science fiction – the ways in which…

The European Union has long been a trendsetter in privacy regulation. Its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and stringent antitrust laws have inspired new legislation around the world. For decades, the EU has codified protections on personal data and fought against what it viewed as commercial exploitation of private information, proudly positioning…