Privacy

Over the last decade there has been a reckoning over how digital companies collect personal data, what they do with it, and whether or not they’re capable of protecting it. Online data collection is still not regulated at the federal level in the U.S. But states are slowly embracing policies…

Talking to a friend today, they had no idea their personal information is constantly being exposed. As a privacy advocate, I need to educate more. I’m alarmed and terrified at the data collected by the social media giants under the guise of providing you with “more relevant ads”. People need…

Facebook Inc. lost a fight to withhold records in an investor lawsuit probing whether the company overpaid in a record $5 billion settlement with a government regulator in 2019 to protect founder Mark Zuckerberg in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. A Delaware judge ruled Wednesday that Facebook must furnish some…

Canada’s new privacy bill, introduced on November 17, 2020, remedies some of the blatant flaws of the current regime, not least of which is the ombudsman model of privacy protection, and what evolved over the years into an often baroque structure. But the question we must ask ourselves is whether…

February 3, 2021 – Technology company Clearview AI’s scraping of billions of images of people from across the Internet represented mass surveillance and was a clear violation of the privacy rights of Canadians, an investigation has found. The joint investigation by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Commission…

#1 It’s the Law – Changes in the privacy landscape is increasing. The EU GDPR was the first major change which was followed by California’s CCPA, Brazil’s LGDP, Canada’s Bill C-11 and the list continues.   On a global scale, new privacy laws and requirements are being developed to provide further guidance around valid…

Google on Monday said new test results show promising signs that the technology it’s hoping will replace cookie-based ad targeting is working. Why it matters: Google and web browser rivals Apple and Mozilla have all introduced sweeping privacy changes recently that will collectively phase out cookies, an internet tracking tool that tracks users’…

Brazil got itself into the data privacy regulation game in September 2020 with the implementation of its Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (“LGPD”), in spite of calls from businesses and advocates to postpone the regulation due to issues related to COVID-19. Companies operating in Brazil now face, in some cases…

In June 2020, Québec became the first Canadian province to propose a major privacy reform when the government introduced Bill 64, An Act to modernize legislative provisions as regards the protection of personal information, which modifies Québec’s private and public-sector privacy statutes. The Canadian government followed on November 17 with the introduction…

WhatsApp is the most popular communications app on the planet with over two billion users using it for messaging. Bought by Facebook in 2014, the service popularised the use of end-to-end encryption in day-to-day communications, introducing it as its default for messaging in 2016. To do so it cooperated with Moxy Marlinspike’s…