A recent UK study on social networks found that many users aren’t that concerned about posting personal information online because the whole point of social network sites is to share details about yourself so you can link up with other people and communicate. This point of view is not surprising because it’s human nature to focus on the benefits and not think through all the possible consequences. Also, people’s comfort level online is directly related to assumptions they make about risk.
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Last week, after months of speculation from critics and the media, the Minister of Industry unveiled new amendments to Canada’s intellectual property law, the Copyright Act. Previous attempts to revamp the legislation in 2005 dropped off the radar when Parliament went into election mode. This largely extinguished public debate of the bill, which Canada’s privacy champions had spoken out against. At the time, the privacy commissioners of Canada, Ontario and British Columbia all expressed similar concern over the government’s direction.
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Some of us from the Office attended the MESH Conference in Toronto last month, jumping at the chance to hear a number of thought leaders and innovators in media, technology and society. Privacy, data protection and reputation management were subjects discussed in several of the sessions, but two video clips are available that demonstrate how online users can have wildly different approaches to privacy and the protection of personal information.
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Starting today, young people can turn to youthprivacy.ca, an interactive web site that offers advice about how youth can protect their personal information and take charge of how their identity is being shaped online.
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Two pictures taken during a Net Neutrality rally on Parliament Hill last week.
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The author of a new article on surveillance in The Walrus thinks you do. Hal Niedzviecki says that while the thought of being monitored used to disturb us (think George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four), cameras and other surveillance techniques are so prevalent today that we’ve stopped noticing them. And, he says, when we do notice we don’t really care (case in point: when it was announced that 10,000 cameras would be installed in Toronto’s subways, streetcars and buses, he asserts that citizens “shrugged and went about their business”).
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Several Canadian universities, including Queen’s and the University of Victoria, recently launched a multi-disciplinary study on the sociological and cultural impacts of surveillance. “The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting” received $2.5 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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The social networking site Facebook has been under scrutiny lately for lax security with its applications feature. Applications in Facebook are created by third-party software developers and are run on third-party servers. These applications can take many forms – a quiz, a game, or just another way to reach out to friends – but the common feature in all is that they allow software developers to access Facebook users’ personal data.
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They are, according to one of London’s top police officers. In an interview with The Guardian, Mick Neville, head of New Scotland Yard’s Visual Images, Identifications and Detections Office, says that even though Britain has more security cameras than any other country in Europe, CCTV cameras have, so far, helped solve just three per cent of street robberies in London.
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Last week, Al Kamen of the Washington Post published an ironic article lightly criticizing his Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff about his statement that fingerprints aren’t personal information.
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