Privacy

This podcast series, intended for private sector companies doing business in Québec, dives into the requirements of Act 25 coming into force on September 22, 2022. Candice Hévin and Marie-Eve Jean, from our Privacy & Data Protection Group, lead the discussions on the changes to the private sector regime, namely the amendments to the…

On September 22, 2022, the first set of amendments from Bill 64, specifically to Quebec’s Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (Quebec Privacy Act) will come into force. Although most amendments will come into force in September 2023, we wanted to highlight some key new…

In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million…

Patient privacy has been inviolable since the time of Hippocrates, in 400 BC. That may be about to end. Last week Amazon announced it is going to acquire One Medical, a health care provider with over 700,000 patients. Big Tech has flirted with health care for years. Amazon’s direct entry into primary health…

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to…

Earlier this month, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (“OPC”) released a summary of its key recommendations for a new federal private sector privacy law (the “Key Recommendations”), one that would update or replace the existing Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (“PIPEDA”).[1] The federal government most recently attempted to amend…

The privacy environment has changed significantly since I took office in 2014. Following 9/11, the need to protect against further terrorist attacks seemed to outweigh privacy interests of individuals. This trend has changed with time, in part due to the Edward Snowden revelations made in 2013. The urgency of adopting…

Recent caselaw demonstrates that privacy laws reach further than some organisations might expect. Introduction: the identifiability test Most information privacy and data protection laws around the world have as their starting point some notion of identifiability.  Legal obligations will typically only apply to data that relates to an ‘identifiable’ person. For…

Standards and frameworks provide real benefits for privacy management. Standards are established norms to be applied consistently across organizations, while frameworks are a set of basic guidelines to be adapted to an organization’s needs. Both can help to fulfill compliance obligations, build trust, benchmark against industry best practices, support strategic…

VENMO’S BAFFLING DECISION to turn payments into a social media feed, where public transactions are the default, has rightly been met with criticism. But at the very least, it’s always been possible to make Venmo transactions private. Now, imagine a financial system that’s not just public by default, but can’t ever be made private,…