Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddard, released her annual report recently.
In the report, she notes that her predecessor, Bruce Phillips, in his outgoing report 6 years ago, already called the weaknesses of the Privacy Act
… all the more striking now that Parliament has passed the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. This act (which regulates personal information handling in the private sector) contains many features that are superior to the Privacy Act, making a comprehensive review of the existing law both urgent and unavoidable.
Such a review has still not taken place. As the current report states, “If the review of the Act was both ‘urgent and unavoidable’ in 2000, it is even more so today.”
As we have written, there are numerous privacy issues that arise from new technologies and applications that cry out for review. As Commissioner Stoddard’s report notes:
Technological and social changes in the last 20 years – the creation of the Internet and the World Wide Web, new information and communication technologies, globalization, global positioning systems, video surveillance, outsourcing, data mining and the commodification of personal information – have not just changed the landscape, they have put us on another planet.