You Might be Interested In

Once again, folks from the Office attended “Canada’s web conference”, MESH 2009, in Toronto – a place where flacks, marketers, hackers, people with money to spend, people looking for money, and activists gather and talk about how the web is “affecting media, marketing, business and society as a whole”.

Just ten minutes at this conference is a lesson in how much human communication has changed. People don’t generally put up their hands to ask questions – instead they send messages to the organizers through Twitter. When Toronto Mayor, David Miller (who is known for using the web to get information out to citizens) gave his keynote, and was subsequently interviewed onstage, he paused several times to either tweet or to read new messages he was receiving. And gone are the days of hanging around after a presentation to fill out a feedback form – at this conference people send tweets about the quality of a speaker or session as it’s unfolding, causing others to abandon simultaneously-running sessions to join the one that’s getting all the attention.

All it takes is a quick glance at some of the sessions that were offered (“managing your persona online”; how to integrate social media into your marketing plan”; and “using online word of mouth” are just a few examples) to see how privacy is intertwined with the new online reality. One keynote speaker, Jessica Jackley, co-founder of kiva.org, the world’s first peer-to-peer online micro-lending web site, is living proof of how the Internet can be used for good. But isn’t privacy also a theme here, what with the online financial transactions that make the whole thing possible, not to mention the protection of the personal details of both the lenders and entrepreneurs?

The MESH conference tagline is “connect, share and inspire” and one of the themes is while social media can be “a difficult reality for some companies, it also offers tremendous opportunities for both businesses and individuals to communicate, collaborate, entertain and inform”. These are exciting words and ideas – as long as we don’t forget the important privacy implications that go hand-in-hand with them.

We have the winning videos from the 2008 My Privacy & Me National Video Competition for young people! Participants from Encounters with Canada, a national youth forum that brings together teens from across Canada for week-long adventures in learning and discovery, selected the winners from among seven finalists.

The top three video artists are:

1st place: Siobhan Mortimer of John F. Ross CVI school in Guelph, Ontario, with a video titled A Lesson in Privacy. She wins a $100 gift card and an iPod Touch.

2nd place: Kevin Saychareun and Jennifer Paul of St. Marguerite d’Youville Secondary school in Brampton, Ontario, with a video titled The Facebook Experiment. They each win a $250 gift card.

3rd place: Sam Gawron, also of John F. Ross CVI in Guelph, with a video titled Your Life, Your Privacy. She wins a $150 gift card.

Four secondary schools and their teachers were also recognized for their enthusiastic participation in the contest. They were:

o Carol Shaw, of Woodstock Collegiate Institute in Woodstock, Ont., with 11 entries.
o Michelle Brady, of John F. Ross Collegiate Vocational Institute in Guelph, Ont., with six entries.
o Toby Rosenbloom, of Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, with five entries.
o Majet Mattar, of Canterbury High School in Ottawa, with four entries.

Each winning school receives Adobe software, including suites of design tools and editing products for video and still photography.

The videos have been posted to our youth web site and can also be viewed on our YouTube channel.

We were so pleased with the number and quality of submissions we received in the first year of our contest – stay tuned for more information about our 2009 contest!

The deadline has passed, the videos are in and we have seven finalist videos from our 2008 My Privacy & Me National Video Competition for young people. Watch these videos and you’ll see how young people took our instructions to heart. These videos cover a wide-range of privacy topics and can easily be used as public service announcements. They communicate many different privacy messages and were shot in a variety of formats, from claymation to animation to staged skits. Most importantly, each video conveys the importance of personal privacy.

We were thrilled with the response we got to our first contest – when you watch these seven videos you’ll see first-hand the caliber of the videos we received.

Stay tuned for news on the winning video and on the second- and third-place finishes. On February 10th, we are holding an event with the students from the Encounters with Canada program. These students, from schools all across Canada, will view our seven final videos and choose the first, second and third-place winners. We will feature these winning videos on this site and on our YouTube channel. The winning artists will receive an iPod Touch and a $100 gift card to the store of their choice. Second place gets a $250 gift card; third place gets a $150 gift card. On February 10th, we will also announce the school that submitted the most entries – this lucky school entries automatically wins Adobe Creative Suite, one of the best software design packages available.

We hope you enjoy watching these impressive videos that young people created for our contest. And stay tuned for information on our 2009 My Privacy & Me National Video Competition!

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”).

What’s more, he points out that video cameras are only one means of surveillance – and that many people don’t realize this. Think of Air Miles programs that collect information on your shopping habits (and give you points in return) and social networking sites that let you update your “status”, enabling you to let people know what you are doing as often as you like. Because we enjoy these activities, and because some of them bring us pleasure, Niedzviecki makes the argument that we actually enjoy being watched.

He also contends that because we enjoy many of these activities, and because our current focus is more on protection against terrorism than on privacy and state totalitarianism, we either see surveillance as a good thing (protection) or we get so used to it that we don’t see it at all. He goes into detail about the implications of this.

And while some of the author’s concerns might be a bit of a stretch (he refers to Hitler’s actions as “the world’s first genocide by database”), it does make sense to think twice when you are revealing personal information online and when out in the real world doing seemingly simple things like buying milk. And if you have questions about how you are being watched you can always refer to OPC guidelines on video surveillance in the public sector and in the private sector.

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.

Don’t expect the cameras to disappear, however. According to The Register, the comments “appear to be a thinly veiled plea for more cash to be poured into the country’s favourite surveillance technology”.

Day to day, our actions are being captured, and increasingly, it’s being done by surveillance cameras. This technology – like RFID tags – is being used by more organizations everyday to improve security and deter thieves. And while that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to employ cameras, organizations should also be ensuring their surveillance activities minimize the impact on people’s privacy.

With that in mind, we released new video surveillance guidelines earlier this month, setting out how organizations should evaluate the use of video surveillance and how to respect privacy rights and comply with the law.

And if our guidelines can be considered the Top Ten list on what to do when considering video surveillance, think of this video as the Top Ten list on what not to do.

On the second day of the Terra Incognita conference, we had the opportunity to hear about recent innovations in radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs).

RFIDs have been presented as a tremendous technological advancement that will help companies large and small track their inventory, expedite shipments and protect goods in a retail environment. By design, they are also tracking devices. This can have an effect on personal privacy if RFID technology is linked to information that can identify an individual.

Two distinct perspectives were presented. Dr. Kathryn Albrecht, the Director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, delivered a critical broadside against radio tags and their consumer applications. On the other hand, Dr. Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, argued the benefits of building privacy guarantees into technologies such as RFIDs. She focused specifically on her Office’s work and the development of the IPC Privacy Guidelines for RFID Information Systems.

We have transferred both Dr. Albrecht and Dr. Cavoukian’s presentations to video.google.ca. They are embedded below as well.

In addition, the Conference research papers and presentations on RFIDs are available online.

On the second day of our conference, Professor Valerie Steeves spoke about how children interact with popular sites like Webkinz, Neopets and Barbie Girls. We have already provided a brief summary of her presentation and her fellow speakers on the subject, but thought you would like to see her speech. The presentation deck she used for her speech, and to which she refers, is also available online.

As we mentioned several weeks ago, Michael Chertoff spoke at the opening session of the 29th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners.

The Secretary of Homeland Security spoke about the tension between privacy and security, and questioned whether every step taken to strengthen national security must come at the expense of privacy? A few more details are available on the Secretary’s own blog.

Today, we finally uploaded his 30 minute speech. It’s available on video.google.ca, and we’ve embedded it below as well.

We heard from Peter Fleischer, the Chief Privacy Officer for search company Google, on Friday.

Speaking in French, he touched upon how Google faced different expectations to protect personal information and privacy from consumers and advocates in different countries and jurisdictions around the world.

As could be expected, he also argued for the creation of global privacy standards. Mr. Fleischer also emphasized that some data needs to be retained in order to personalize the services offered by Google and other online applications – and emphasized that users find the personalization of services extremely valuable and convenient.

The video is divided into two parts, and is only available in French. Sorry.