Tuesday, December 21, 2004

CIPPIC v Abika.com: Part deux

The Candian Internet and Policy Public Interest Clinic has filed a second, revised complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, following the Assistant Commissioner's decision to not investigate the initial complaint because Abika.com is entirely located within the United States. More information is available from the CIPPIC website:
CIPPIC News - CIPPIC:

"On December 14, 2004, CIPPIC sent a formal complaint about Abika.com to the Federal Trade Commission in the United States, alleging violations of US law. We also responded to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada by way of a letter encouraging her to reconsider her staff's determination that they could not investigate companies located wholly in the USA. After discussions with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, we filed another complaint against Abika.com under PIPEDA on December 20, 2004.

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For the background to this second complaint, see PIPEDA and Canadian Privacy Law: CIPPIC complaint raises a number of novel and interesting issues and PIPEDA and Canadian Privacy Law: Jurisdictional limitations on Canadian privacy law.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

CIPPIC is working on public funds and is supposed to be truthful. However CIPPIC lies in most of their complaints. The Canadian Privacy Commissioner stated in their letter that PIPEDA and any other Canadian Privacy legislation does not apply to companies that are not located or have a physical presence in Canada. How low is CIPPIC gonna go to twist the truth and make false allegations. The complaint to the FTC is also untruthful with too many errors. Pippa Lawson the so called executive director of CIPPIC makes these false allegations to serve her personal motive.

Anonymous said...

Heather Mac Donald who is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute calls far left and loony activists Privocrats who put privacy ahead of national security. A honest person has nothing to fear from the free flow of information as they have nothing to hide. Our society has prospered and thrived by learning about each other, not by hiding from each other.

Anonymous said...

PRIVACY PERPETUATES VIOLENCE AND SUBORDINATION AGAINST WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND THE ELDERLY. Vulnerable citizens cannot be protected from domestic violence if unbreachable boundaries of legally sanctioned privacy surround the family. The worthiness of the privacy ideal has been called into question as problems of domestic violence suggest a need for more, rather than less, involvement in the traditionally "private" spheres of home and family life.
-- Anita L. Allen, Professor, University of Pennsylvania School of Law

Anonymous said...

** Our society has one great knack above all others -- one that no other ever managed -- that of holding the mighty accountable. Although elites of all kinds still have many advantages over commonfolk, never before have citizens been so empowered. And history shows that this didn't happen by blinding the mighty -- a futile endeavor that has never worked. It happened by insisting that everybody get to see. By citizens demanding the power to know. The important thing to remember is that anyone who claims a right to keep something private is also claiming a right to deny knowledge to others, to blind others. Freedom thrives when there is openness and accountability. Elites will always have some advantages, but we're all better protected by knowing than by forbidding others to know. (It is far easier to verify that you know something, than to verify that someone else is ignorant.)
-- David Brin Ph.D, Renowned Author & Astrophysicist.

Anonymous said...

Unrestricted flow of information is the life of democracies. Our founding fathers emphasized on the freedom of speech so that there is enough discussion and information available to people when making a choice to elect who will govern and that those who are elected stay honest and transparent and it has worked. Every decision in life is about making choices and if unrestricted flow of information has worked on the macro level it sure can work on the micro level. The more information available about people the lower the risk in dealing with other people and the better relations between people. In most instances little information is more harmful than full information. If information is widely available then facts can generally be verified through many different sources and there are less chances of inaccuracies. Human beings should be free to learn about each other as they always have been and the freedom to learn about each other is as fundamental and unalienable as any other right. Unrestricted flow of information is a great equalizer for the only way there can be a big brother institution is if information is only available to a select few. If information is widely available to everyone then there cannot be any big brother institution.

Anonymous said...

Autocrats control and oppress people by tyranny and Privocrats control and oppress people by secrecy.

Anonymous said...

On the one hand, openess is important. In an idyllic society, where noone wants to hurt anyone else, and everyone is both trustworthy and selfless to a degree that they would never do anything, or through inaction etc, allow others to come to harm from their knowledge, why not have free flow of information.

Why do we have locks on our doors? Why do we make passwords? Why do we need a judicial system, police, and military? People get their homes broken into, their safety put at risk. Their personal information/belongings/identity, often now nearly the same thing, can be stolen easily in a virtual world. People act in their own interests, at the cost of others interests, and balances are put in place to restrict that.

The truth is, knowledge is power, and power is not always used fairly nor wisely. Some would say absolute power corrupts absolutely. Giving equal access to all knowledge, to everyone is not necessarily in the best interests of the whole. A lone individual with knowledge can be both destructive or creative; however, in the hands of a large organization, whether it is a biker gang, the military-industrial complex, or someone's own government, even as such invasion of privacy might quell a terrorist action before it occurs, it might as easily stifle information necessary to root out corruption in such an organization when there is no balance of power established through such things as privacy laws.

Perhaps we can aspire to such a world, where everyone shares everything about one another freely; but I believe some of each person's journey through this world is something that we need to face ourselves... the right to discover the world, and ourselves, without onlookers judging every choice we make or influencing our decisions. The right for people to earn or give trust over time; the right for second chances in new relationships; the right to evolve and become someone other than who and what we're told we are ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/ ) Perhaps this last point might be important to spiritual people: to struggle with our faith, our morals, our human weaknesses, so that people are challenged to do the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing - to earn our redemption, as it were, rather than never having been given a chance to step out of line... and perhaps, finally, for people to see that all our fates are entwined, and that in the end, we will reach our fates together, or not at all (if one nation can cause the world catastrophe, no one nation can be left behind in making a world we can all share - the strong must help the weak)

I got a little off-topic and wishy-washy, or perhaps philosophical at the end, but perhaps there are a few ideas there to give people against any privacy laws etc, whatsoever, some food for thought.