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Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

Data Privacy Day 2009

January 16th, 2009
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Do you have a friend like this?

A group of organizations, including Intel, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, several universities and government agencies, the European Commission, and lots more, have announced the second Data Privacy Day.

On January 28, 2009, the United States, Canada, and 27 European countries will celebrate Data Privacy Day together for the second time.

Designed to raise awareness and generate discussion about data privacy practices and rights, Data Privacy Day activities in the United States have included privacy professionals, corporations, government officials, and representatives, academics, and students across the country.

One of the primary goals of Data Privacy Day is to promote privacy awareness and education among teens across the United States. Data Privacy Day also serves the important purpose of furthering international collaboration and cooperation around privacy issues.

I wrote a post called Take Back Your Self that talks about why the concept of a digital self, or identity, is important to protect. I strongly support the passage of a comprehensive data privacy law, as described in Bruce Schneier’s article. But before we can get a draft for a new law going, we need to encourage a better understanding of what digital identity is all about, and why it matters to protect it.

Take a look at some of the resources available on this page to see if there is anything you can share. I’ll be blogging more as we get closer to Data Privacy Day 2009.

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Working toward Personalized Commerce

December 13th, 2008
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The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada made this outstanding video called Privacy and Social Networks. It’s important to understand, as this video shows, that this harvesting of personal data is going on all the time.

Coaching moment: There are two sides to this problem. On one side are the account holders of these social networking sites. They are busy disclosing their interests, connections, and lives. These account holders may not realize that they are being mapped and sold out to the extent that they are. Perhaps they think it’s ok.

On the other side are the businesses that run these sites. They have Terms of Service (TOS) contracts that account holders agree to, whether they read the terms or not. The businesses engage in harvesting and selling practices that benefit their bottom line. (Would you expect anything less? They are businesses, and this is one way that it’s done.) The problem is that the buying and selling of account holder data is not transparent to the account holders.

If this makes you feel uneasy (and I think it should), think about how you’d change this model. An underlying assumption of the whole user data exchange is that companies want to sell you their stuff. The harvesting and data collection is about making sure you’re more likely to be interested in what they want to sell you. Marketers don’t like guessing, and they often get it wrong. (When you don’t buy, it’s a wasted catalog).

But what would it look like if you had a platform for requesting marketing material for something you’re interested in buying, instead of getting angry that you have so much spam and bulk mail (catalogs and the like)?

This is a much longer post about some work being done in this area. Read more…

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U.S., Canadian firms: worlds apart on Privacy (2004)

May 24th, 2004
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Lemme see… customer loyalty or legislative compliance. As a business, which would I choose? Seems Canadian firms go with the former, while U.S. firms prefer the latter. Do the same people that make this decision also wonder why the American “consumer” market doesn’t trust many of the companies they do business with?

The study, the first to compare the corporate privacy practices of comparable Canadian and U.S. firms, found that Canadian businesses see their privacy practices as an opportunity to improve relations with customers, while their U.S. counterparts viewed privacy measures more as a way of complying with legislation and avoiding civil lawsuits.

Indeed, 61 per cent of surveyed Canadian companies linked ‘good privacy practices’ to customer trust and brand loyalty, compared to only 17 per cent of U.S. companies.

‘Canadian privacy leaders seem to understand and respect the need for compliance with federal and provincial laws,’ states the study, which was commissioned by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner.

‘However, they rarely see compliance as the single goal or mission of privacy management (and) are more likely to hold the view or belief that their role is inextricably tied to information ethics rather than obedience to the law.’

Coaching moment: Privacy and self-determination go hand in hand. The question is NOT whether you have something to hide. It’s whether you have something to lose.

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