Surveillance

On February 3, 2021, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec (CAI), the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (OIPC BC), and the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta (AB OIPC, and together with the BC OIPC, the CAI and the OPC, the Regulators), published…

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…

October 29, 2020 – Cadillac Fairview – one of North America’s largest commercial real estate companies – embedded cameras inside their digital information kiosks at 12 shopping malls across Canada and used facial recognition technology without their customers’ knowledge or consent, an investigation by the federal, Alberta and BC Privacy Commissioners…

The Court of Justice of the European Union continues to make things interesting in the data protection world. First came the court’s “Schrems II” decision last July, and this week, the CJEU issued a ruling that could spring a leak and potentially sink adequacy negotiations between the U.K. and EU.…

The Internet of Things has the potential to usher in many possibilities—including a mass surveillance state. In the July issue, I wrote about how user consent is an important prerequisite for companies building connected devices. But there are other ways companies are trying to ensure that connected devices don’t invade people’s…

In “Schrems II” (Case C-311/18), the CJEU invalidated Privacy Shield based on the potential interference with data subject rights caused by US government surveillance carried out under Section 702 of FISA and EO 12333. The Court also referred to PRISM and UPSTREAM, two surveillance programs revealed by the Snowden leaks.…

Canadians may now request they not appear in Clearview AI’s facial recognition search results, days after the controversial U.S.-based firm announced it was pulling out of this country. Sometime this week, Clearview quietly posted a link on its website allowing Canadian residents to “opt out.” The company doesn’t ask for…

Google’s push to become a privacy-positive company over the past year has been, depending on how you look at it, an act of genuine benevolence, a brilliant marketing decision, or straight-up bullshit. So when Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company’s latest moves in the privacy-protecting space on Twitter yesterday,…

• Trump 2020 app uses data to sidestep online platforms • Biden app accesses phone contacts to build ‘relational organizing’ • Trump inspiration appears to come from India’s Narendra Modi Ahead of President Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his 2020 re-election campaign manager Brad Parscale tweeted about the event. “Just…

Have you ever wondered why online ads appear for things that you were just thinking about? There’s no big conspiracy. Ad tech can be creepily accurate. Tech giant Oracle is one of a few companies in Silicon Valley that has near-perfected the art of tracking people across the internet. The…