Today’s Slaw post.
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, appeared yesterday before the House of Commons access to information, privacy and ethics committee.
The Commissioner would like PIPEDA to include stronger penalties for privacy violations as an incentive to comply. PIPEDA currently has no financial sanctions. If a violator does not conform to a decision of the Commissioner, the recourse is for the Commissioner to take it to the Federal court, which has powers to order compliance and grant damages.
In part this seems to be driven by “…the apparent disregard that some of these social media companies have shown for Canadian privacy laws.”
I’m wondering what readers think about this.
Would the ability to collect financial penalties for PIPEDA violations make a difference?
Does the complexity and newness of social media products make it inherently difficult to get privacy right and create clear and simple privacy policies – or do they just not put enough effort into it upfront?
Thanks for the question David. Unfortunately, in this internet era, it seems to me that giant technology and media companies are more than ready to abuse individual privacy in search of profit at the expense of principle. Not only would I support a financial penalty but would ask that it be graduated in relation to the size of the infraction. This way big players won’t simply pay small fines as a cost of doing business.
Going further, although I respect the desire to keep the internet “open” my deeper desire, based on my lifelong arts activism, is to see our government take the valuation of works of the mind, copyright works, more seriously. Their Copyright Modernization Act, about to go to the Senate as Bill C-11 fails in this regard. The goals of the bill are correct but it fails in the technical details. I would be very pleased (and I must confess greatly surprised) if our chamber of sober second thought would actually think about it now and use their minds (i recognize several good ones on the majority side) to make the suitable adjustments that rights holders have put forward. Otherwise I fear we will either disseminate several key cultural industries (notably educational publishing) so badly that, by the time we get back to the legislation we may have lost them to jurisdictions where intellectual property rights are respected at least as much as large technology and information aggregation, as a business.