Workplace privacy panel notes and case citations attached

I greatly enjoyed sitting on a panel with Professor Avner Levin on workplace privacy today!  

Dr. Levin and other members of the Ryerson University Privacy and Cyber Crime Institute at the Ted Rogers School of Management have recently published a leading study on the perceptions of risk of young Canadians engaged in online socializing and how their behaviors meet with the use of online social networks by business for commercial and human resources purposes. Dr. Levin’s work raises some important and difficult questions about whether the law should cause companies who provide social networking platforms that are used predominantly by youth to take greater responsibility for user privacy (and other content-related disputes). I commend it to you.

I did promise to provide a copy of my preparatory notes (most of which we did not touch on) as well as coordinates for some of the cases that came up in discussion. Here are the notes and the cases:

• The Johnson v. Bell decision on PIPEDA application and “personal e-mails”
• Hooper v. College of Nurses of Ontario on PHIPA application
• The Colwell constructive dismissal for privacy breach case
• The Cheskes adoption disclosure decision, in which the Ontario Superior Court of Justice said that consensual disclosure is a principle of fundamental justice
• The Murphy v. Perger case on the expectation of privacy in information disclosed to Facebook friends
• The British Columbia IPC University of British Columbia decision on investigations into employee computer misuse
• The Imperial Oil drug testing judicial review

Take care!

Dan