Privacy ← Innovation Law Blog

Privacy and Personality in the Digital Era

Mar

2013

If one’s likeness, name, or voice is objectively valuable, the Court may consider one’s property (Athans v Canadian Adventure Camps (1977), 17 OR (2d) 425, 80 DLR (3d) 583 (HC)). Personality can be considered property in about 20 of the American states, for examples New York, California, Tennessee, Indiana, and New Jersey. Several, including Indiana and California, allow the ...

How much of the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Bill (C-30) is about protecting children?

Tamana Hafid

Feb

2013

Bill C-30 was introduced in February 2012 and as some recall, according to the Minister of Public Safety, Vic Toews, critics had the choice to “either stand with [the proponents of the bill] or with the child pornographers.” Oddly enough, the name of the bill wasn’t even Protecting Children from Internet Predators at the onset. ...

Licensing Autonomous Cars

David Pardy

Oct

2012

This post is about licensing partly autonomous cars. Not legally speaking, autonomous cars are those which can drive themselves without any human input, and partly (or mostly) autonomous cars have reduced human input. They use sensors to provide electronic input to a rapidly interpreting computer, and the computer controls some or all of the car’s ...

“Do Not Track” – Recent Developments in Internet Privacy

Henry Ren

Mar

2012

Fresh off successful efforts to quash the Stop Online Piracy Act, a number of internet companies are turning to consumer privacy issues. Web giants like Google and Facebook have been facing mounting political pressure and popular demands for greater user choice and control over privacy settings. In the forefront of the debate is the proposed ...

Google’s New Privacy Policy: Going Too Far? 1

Sarit Pandya

Mar

2012

Anyone who uses one of Google’s multitudes of services recently has been confronted with Google’s new Privacy Policy, which was implemented on the 1st of March. Internet privacy is obviously a major concern for users and governments alike, and this new policy has been met with mixed reaction. Canadian reaction has suggested that it is ...

Google Announces New Privacy Policy

William Wu

Feb

2012

Last week, Google announced its new privacy policy, which will take effect on March 1. Google is doing away with the over 60 different existing privacy policies for its various products and replace them with one single shorter and simpler privacy policy. Those who are most affected by this change are people with Google accounts. ...

Ontario Court of Appeal Recognizes Tort of “Invasion of Seclusion”

Henry Ren

Jan

2012

In its recent ruling in Jones v Tsige, the Ontario Court of Appeal formally confirmed the existence of an actionable cause for invasion of seclusion. While the tort of appropriation of personality has long been recognized in Ontario, this appellate decision is the first in the province to give an unequivocal right of action based ...

The Phone Book in Your Pocket

Giselle Chin

Dec

2011

In an age where the phone book has nigh become obsolete, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has used it to analogize the federal government’s proposed lawful access legislation. His analogy was a response to serious privacy concerns over the proposed legislation, raised by the likes of Privacy Commissioners at both the federal and provincial levels. Lisa Austin, associate law ...

Carrier IQ faces lawsuits over controversial tracking software

Kevin P. Siu

Dec

2011

Last week, a furor was caused by software developer Carrier IQ, who develop software used to track mobile phone usage in diagnostic and network monitoring purposes. A researcher, Trevor Eckhart, reverse-engineered his HTC Evo Android phone and found that Carrier IQ’s software tracked his keystrokes, search queries and text messages with no ability to turn ...

Crowdsourcing Justice in the London Riots

Giselle Chin

Aug

2011

Following Vancouver’s example in June, social media has once again been enlisted to help identify the rioters and looters of London’s riots last week. Scotland Yard has posted stills from surveillance cameras on their Flickr account, asking for help in identifying suspects. And independent “name-and-shame” sites have also cropped up, including one Tumblr site called “Catch ...