Privacy

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…

In its July 16 ruling, the European court declared the Privacy Shield, which has underpinned data flows between the European Union and the U.S., to be immediately invalid. Suddenly, as many as 5,000 companies, from banks to payroll processors and social media goliaths like Facebook and Google, are forced to…

There’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that privacy is in fact a meaningful driver of business value. Yet so often, whether within an early stage startup or significantly larger organisation, privacy is an afterthought. Privacy and Data Protection are too rarely ‘by design’. We think about this a…

Does your organization want to aggregate and analyze data to learn trends, but in a way that protects privacy? Or perhaps you are already using differential privacy tools, but want to expand (or share) your knowledge? In either case, this blog series is for you. Why are we doing this…

On June 1, California’s Office of the Attorney General submitted the final proposed regulations package for the California Consumer Privacy Act to the Office of Administrative Law for review. Included in this package is the Final Statement of Reasons, explaining the modifications from the initially proposed text of the regulations,…

The Tim Hortons breakfast empire is feeling the heat in its native Canada over the data collection practices of its mobile app. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), along with the privacy commissioners of the provinces of Quebec, Alberta and British Columbia is launching an investigation to…