The OBA just published its December edition of the Eye on Privacy newsletter.  This edition has a good article by my colleague Michelle Alton entitled “Personal Information on Online Sources and Employment Recruitment.”  There’s also a nice case summary by John Swaigen of the IPC on a House of Lords case from June called Common Services Agency.  The case seems to be loaded with lots of good FOI and privacy issues, including an issue about the duty to create anonymized (or, in this case, “barnardised”) records to facilitate public access.  Sounds like a good read.

I presented today at a regional conference of the Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers on “the law and ethics of recruiting in today’s wired world.” This is an encore from a presentation I did back in June, described here. The two topics I focussed on today were (1) employee online speech, with a special focus on its use by recruiters, and (2) legal issues in the “war for talent.”  We had a great discussion, and I’d like to thank the organizers for the invite.

Here are my slides.

This looks like it has been around for a while, but I just had a listen to this five-part podcast from a Princeton University Centre for Information Technology Policy workshop from last January.  I skimmed the rest, but listened twice to the full clip of the panel on the possession and ownership of data.  The panel presentation itself invites a fairly rigorous but general debate about privacy and technology, but the question period gets better and better, ending with some good dialogue on issues specific to cloud computing.

Enjoy!

I’m very happy to support Steven Matthews’ Canadian Law Blog Awards by talking a bit about who I follow as well as forwarding three nominations for the 2008 awards.

My nominations are…

1. Slaw.  Not that it needs my help!  I recently explained my re-finding of Slaw. You can practice with your head down or you can practice with good view of the context in which you’re practicing.  I can’t think of a better source of information for a Canadian lawyer to build that good view.
2. Cavanagh Williams Update.  This is a great blog for its coverage of Ontario civil procedure and related cases.  I hope I’m being fair by classifying it as a “by-lawyers-for-lawyers” blog, but as such it has garnered praise from more than one of my blog-following Hicks Morley colleagues.  Though it was posted shortly before 2008, I particularly appreciated the firm’s coverage of the 2007 Montebello civil justice conference.
3. The Court.  Another super-heavyweight.  If you haven’t noticed, it’s the substantive law that gets me, and for regular commentary on the substantive law The Court ranks at the top on relevance and credibility. I prefer a little more brevity than offered by The Court, but will actually print and digest a post that hits the mark like Ryder Gilliand’s comment on Simpson v. Mair.

Along with these I’ve been following a number of others, most super-heavyweights and most with content that overlaps to some degree with my own.  In no particular order, my other top reads are David Canton, David Fraser, Deeth Williams Wall e-Tips, Michael Fitzgibbon, Michael Geist, Alan Gahtan and Rob Hyndman.  As the last task in the dying moments of my staycation, I’ve updated by blogroll to include links to them all.  Now I’m ready to go back to work!

It was a very pleasant surprise when after a long day of work back in September I received contact from Yasmin Nissim, a recent masters graduate in Legal Studies now working at Carleton University’s FOI and privacy office. Yasmin sent me a copy of her master’s thesis, Negotiating the Balance:  Reconciling Individual Privacy and Public Interest When Addressing At-Risk Individuals, Campus Violence and Ontario Privacy Legislation.  Here’s her abstract:

The recent application of Ontario’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) to the university sector has raised new issues between the habitually conflicting perspectives of individual privacy and the public interest.  This study attempts to reconcile these opposing sides with the goal of illustrating that, under the new privacy regime, Ontario Universities can achieve a balance between these interests.  Using the massacre that took place at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in April of 2007 as a case study and a media analysis of the resulting moral panic that followed, this thesis discusses the negative consequences of allowing privacy legislation to go misunderstood and misapplied when dealing with at-risk students.  Ontario Universities have the opportunity to clarify their new privacy landscape and institute a framework that would protect the safety and security of the general public by identifying at-risk students without jeopardizing the individual privacy of those identified. 

I finally got a chance to sit down with Yasmin’s thesis and found it very insightful. I also agree with Yasmin’s view that the balance between personal privacy and public security that is currently struck under FIPPA is a proper one that should not be upset in reaction to crises like Virginia Tech.

Yasmin has graciously agreed to allow me to share to her thesis here.  If you use it in your own work please include an appropriate citation.

Back in TO.  Managed a stormy surf at Bluffer’s Park yesterday before coming home to read the following:

• Sheri Qualters, 1st Circuit Upholds Law Barring Marketers From Using Data on Doctors’ Prescriptions. Issues about the use of prescriber data have been litigated in Canada under our commercial sector privacy legislation. This describes a case in which a U.S. federal appellate court held that a statutory restriction on the use of prescriber data was not an unconstitutional limit on speech. (Law.com)
• John Markoff, You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy? This is a story on the use of networks (mostly of the wireless kind) to develop dynamic knowledge. Google’s flu trends project is cited by the author as an example of this kind of “collective intelligence” or “networked sensor” application. (New York Times)
• Jeffrey Rosen, Google’s Gatekeepers. This feature article is about how Google processes take-down requests and the process’s ramifications for free expression on the internet. (New York Times)

Another reason I’d recommend a staycation to over-busy professionals is that it’s a great way to get your life in order. We knocked off most of our Christmas shopping early last week and have gotten rid of a handful other nagging household projects. Today I took care of a personal project and rationalized the list of RSS feeds I follow, dumping a bunch of low value and adding some others, including Slaw.ca.

Sometime in the past one or two years (likely at a point of being overwhelmed in practice), I decided to un-subscribe from Slaw. I can’t remember why, but it probably had something to do with my move away from a role in research and knowledge management.

Un-subscribing was a mistake. Slaw is such a relevant blog, for me certainly but also (I suspect) for most involved in legal practice and academics in Canada. When I went back to Slaw today, for example, I realized that Simon Fodden had already beat me in noting the Time’s Google’s Gatekeeper’s article. He also recently posted something nice on text justification and readability which fits within an interest I have in clear writing, layout and design and usability. I’ve probably missed out on lots in the last while and am glad to be re-focused and back on board!

See ya!

Dan

Just a quick note to say that yesterday the Supreme Court of Canada denied leave to appeal in Innovative Health Group v. Calgary Health Region, the June decision of the Alberta Court of Appeal that deals with the issue of whole disk production. For a case summary, click here.

I’m working on a couple year-end projects that involve assessing what’s happened this year in the world of Canadian information and privacy law (as broadly as I define it here). Here are fourteen cases I’ve picked that are interesting, if not significant.  Please help me out by voting.  You can pick more than one case, but your vote will be weighted equally – i.e. this polling application doesn’t allow for ranking.  If you vote, you get to view the results.  Hope I get enough participation to give this some validity, but we’ll see.  Dan.

We just published the fall edition of the Information and Privacy Post which, as always, includes edited and indexed versions of the cases first reported here. You’ll find the Post here. Enjoy! Dan.