The fourteenth annual Canadian IT Law Association conference just wrapped up and I had the distinct pleasure of sitting on a panel moderated by Michael Erdle, with Lisa Lifshitz and Mark Hayes on the topic of privacy and social media, online advertising and location-based services.
I addressed location based services and, in case you're interested, here is my slide deck setting out the background for discussion:
Michael Power would like to introduce you to FATCA (Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act).
Don't blame the messenger; Michael's a nice guy:
Michael Power - It’s Time You Met FATCA... So affected institutions (remember FATCA covers both financial and non-financial entities) must identify clients who are American (which means asking the question of every client since “U.S. persons” do live abroad); obtain their consent to the disclosure of sensitive personal information to the IRS or withhold the provision of a service for a failure to provide consent to disclose. How these organizations reconcile FATCA compliance with PIPEDA compliance is a topic for another day.
The Privacy Commissioner of Canada has released her draft report on her 2010 Consumer Privacy Consultations that focused on "Online Tracking, Profiling and Targeting and Cloud Computing." You can get to the report here: http://www.priv.gc.ca/resource/consultations/index_e.cfm.
This month's edition of The National magazine (National (English) - October/November 2010) has a significant multi-page article on privacy and social networking, featuring interviews with me, Michael Geist, Ariane Siegel and Jennifer Stoddart.
You can download the entire article in PDF here.
Using the Best and Ignoring the Rest: Connecting Social Media to Business ResultsBlogging? Twitter? Facebook? There is no finishing line in the world of technology. While most law firm leaders are now comfortable with websites, this does not mean that the IT challenge is over. The next challenge is to make the most of social media - to identify, for example, the most promising uses of Twitter and Facebook in communicating and collaborating with clients. To help delegates sort the wheat from the chaff will be leading legal analyst, Jordan Furlong, and panelists moderated by Richard Susskind, with emphasis on case studies of what has worked for law firms in Canada and beyond.
Featured Speaker: Jordan Furlong, Senior Consultant, Stem Legal Web Enterprises, Ottawa
Panelists: Jeremy Grushcow, Lawyer, Ogilvy Renault, Toronto
David Fraser, Partner, McInnes Cooper, Halifax
Scott Wolfe, Jr., Member, Wolfe Law Group, LLC, New Orleans
It appears that another investigation of Facebook by the Privacy Commissioner may be in the offing as it is revealed that the site passed -- perhaps unwittingly -- user info to advertisers and applications. See: Personal info slips through Facebook into advertisers’ hands - The Globe and Mail.
Read David Canton's London Free Press column on the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (that I blogged about previously) here: eLegal Canton � Privacy enforcement transcends all borders.
Celebrity stalking is about to get much, much, much easier thanks to a soon-to-be released app called Just Spotted. Read more at TechCrunch: Celebrity Geo-Stalking In Real-Time. Finally. JustSpotted Launches Next Week.
Of course, this raises issues about celebrity privacy and then one has to ask what is the threshold for "celebrity". It's a bar that's dropping with each new D-lister reality show.
This week's Lawyers Weekly quotes me in an article by donalee moulton on monitoring and protecting your online defamation. See: Mirror, mirror on the web.
Daniel Solove at Concurring Opinions has some interesting thoughts on the progressive demise of defamation and privacy tort cases in the United States:
Concurring Opinions - The Slow Demise of Defamation and the Privacy TortsI think this turn of events is unfortunate. People used to resort to self-help (violence and duels) to vindicate their reputations. Civilized society replaced these methods with a more humane alternative — using the court system to resolve disputes. Sadly, that method is increasingly becoming too expensive and cumbersome for people to use.
Some commentators argue that today, people can more readily have the record corrected or improve their reputations by posting good things about themselves online. But it is hard to manipulate Google and other search engines to make the good information crowd out the bad. The problem is that bad information is often more interesting and juicy — and hence more popular. And popularity is the key to getting information to the top of search engine results. Many people have short attention spans and don’t care to dig to find out the boring truth or other facts about a person.
We need to have an outlet in civilized society for people to vindicate their reputations. We need to have some meaningful way to prevent defamation and invasion of privacy. Otherwise, people will spread all sorts of damaging rumors and gossip about each other online, and victims will return to self-help methods. That would be a big step backwards.
I don't have any Canadian stats at my fingertips, but I would hazard a guess that defamation is flourishing in Canada while the privacy torts are stuck in neutral.
