For years, if you registered a .ca domain, anyone could see your name, address and email in online “whois” databases. In 2008, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) restricted access to this information. Internet law guru Michael Geist hailed early drafts of the CIRA’s new whois policy as “a model for domain name registries around […]
What probably started as a silly prank could turn into criminal charges of personation against a high school student from Brandon, Manitoba, who set up a phony Facebook profile in his teacher's name that included the teacher's photo and biographical details.1 Although in the end, these criminal charges will probably be nothing more than a […]
As a result of the recent proliferation of social networking sites, a debate has emerged over the media’s ability to use photos added to user profiles, in the absence of express permission granted by the owner. Exacerbating this issue was a recent incident where all four of Toronto’s daily newspapers published articles regarding the murder […]
In 2006, Jason Fortuny posted a fake advertisement on Craigslist by a supposed “female bondage enthusiast” who was looking for a “white or latin man ... 2 give intense pain and discipline." The 178 responses, some of which had pictures attached, were then posted on an encyclopaedia website. Recently, a respondent sued Fortuny for damages […]
In making what has been dubbed as an “unprecedented ruling,”[1] a New Zealand Judge banned the publication of the names of two men charged with murder on internet-based news sites. By allowing the names to be published in print, radio and television platforms, Judge David Harvey distinguishing between the internet and the aforementioned media based […]
In August Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart spoke about the growing concerns surrounding the online publication of federal tribunal decisions containing the personal information of individuals.[1] Tribunals routinely publish the full text of their decisions online. Stoddart’s comments are part of a growing debate that pits the long standing “open court” rule against the rights of […]
One of the comments I received on my last privacy post from Reshika Dhir rhetorically questioned whether users of cloud computing applications had a choice in not using these services to reduce their privacy risks. I agree with Reshika that many individuals in first-world countries have come to the point of technology dependence. To add […]
At the dawn of the internet, user privacy was not a concern. The internet consisted of a few bulletin boards, chat groups and static web pages. Most of the public was not using the internet, very little personal information was being exchanged, and it was seldom attached to a real person's identity. From those early […]
I recently attended a lecture by professor Bruce Ziff, of the University of Alberta Law School, where he described what he termed as his only original academic idea. He posited that the reason we as a society are so restrictive about property rights is because it is basically impossible to extinguish property rights that have […]
Advertising has always been, or has tried to be, “targeted” at potential and existing customers. The entire purpose of advertising has, and continues to be, to communicate the virtues of a product or services to consumers in the marketplace in an effort to turn potential consumers into actual customers. In the past, this type of […]