As I flipped through the National Post Saturday morning, my eyes were drawn to two stories placed on pages FP2 and FP3.
There is the conclusion of an article by Matt Hartley carrying a headline of “Canada’s privacy boss setting rules for the world,” describing Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart as “Global Web Cop”. The story talks about the success of Canada’s Privacy Commission in taking on social media titan Facebook and now anchoring a coalition of global colleagues to take on Google. In the story, she is quoted saying:
There’s a growing impatience among privacy regulatory authorities with the kind of behaviour that doesn’t take privacy regulation into account
Juxtapose this with a Q&A on the opposite page, interviewing Heather Reisman: “Booked for a big future.” Superimposed on a photo of Ms. Reisman is a quote from the interview: “The government realizes that you cannot put legislation on a digital business.”
There used to be a view that digital content could operate in an anarchistic environment. Perhaps it is less a situation that legislation cannot be imposed, and more a case of of what legislation should appropriately be applied.
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Or, maybe it’s more a case of what legislation people/consumers really want which doesn’t always get reflected in legislation deemed appropriately applied simply because sometimes our legislators and/or bureaucrats dream up legislation that is more appropriate for them than it is for the public.
I think you’re straining to find a conflict here, by using a vague notion of “digital content.” Unlike other areas of law that touch the digital domain, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) is not ‘command and control’ legislation.
The Privacy Commissioner herself has criticized authors for making the same assumption alluded to in your blog post. See, for instance, “Cherry Picking Among Apples and Oranges : Refocusing Current Debate About the Merits of the Ombuds-Model Under PIPEDA online: http://www.priv.gc.ca/information/pub/omb_051021_e.cfm