Privacy

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…

Businesses faced so many issues in 2020 that they could be forgiven for not updating their protocols for Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (“LGPD”), Brazil’s new data privacy regulation, especially in light of the government’s refusal to delay implementation of the regulation in light of COVID-19 concerns. Indeed, a number…

Popular messaging service WhatsApp recently saw a huge group of its users jump ship for rival platforms. The reason for the switch? An updated privacy policy. WhatsApp recently announced a new privacy policy that no longer allows users to opt out of  sharing their data with parent company Facebook. According…

Since the beginning of 2020, communities throughout the world—personal and professional—have been impacted in a way that was always only talked about in hypothetical scenarios, such as running an organization completely virtually. Belief in the technological prowess achieved by humans meant that this hypothesis would never come to be tested.…