Newsletter
Privacy Preoccupations
Valerie Lawton, Senior Communications Advisor
How do you contribute to the promotion and protection of privacy in Canada?
I’m part of a team that helps inform Canadians about privacy issues and rights. We also educate organizations – federal departments and agencies and businesses – about what they need to do to protect our personal information. I spend a lot of my time writing – everything from speeches for the Commissioner to annual reports to news releases. I also offer advice on communications strategies on hot files. I was a journalist on Parliament Hill in a past life and used to cover the Privacy Commissioner’s Office. Now I occasionally find myself on the receiving end of questions from my former colleagues. (I’ll tell you, it’s easier to ask questions than answer them!) I love my job because I see the impact and the importance of our Office’s work on a daily basis in my own life – for example, when retailers ask me for personal information they don’t actually need or when I check my Facebook page.
What privacy issue keeps you up at night?
I worry about what privacy will look like when my children are grown. The pressures on privacy in 2010 are coming from so many different directions that I wonder whether they’ll enjoy the same kinds of privacy rights and freedoms that we do today. Increasingly, private sector organizations see our personal information as the key to making money and they seem to be vacuuming up more and more of it. In an online world, much of this collection has become invisible – every click we make gets captured, stored and analyzed in ways most of us don’t fully understand. At the same time, governments around the globe are collecting mountains of our personal data in a bid to stop terrorists from doing us harm. However, the collection, storage and analysis of all of this information is raising new risks for our society – and I wonder how much further this trend will go in the future. Sometimes I question whether enough people are concerned about these issues – a good reason to come to work each morning!