Federal privacy chief urges law revamp
As the threat for identity theft gets stronger than ever, privacy advocates believe Canadian legislation enacted to protect the privacy of personal information is dated. In the recent tabling of her Annual Report, Federal Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart urged Parliament to review and modernize the Privacy Act.
Readers write back:
October 22, 2007 - The entire framework of legal admonitions concerning Privacy is flawed and the Privacy Commissioner function in society will increasingly come across as beside the point and ineffective if it doesn't engage data architecture as the core way of protecting citizen information.
You'll find relevant detail in a somewhat dated article I did for CIO Magazine in 2005.
In summary, so long as the Definitions section of ATIPP acts across the country continue to define 'the-purpose-for-which-it-is-collected'B at the domain level (Health, Payroll, Motor Vehicles), they will continue de facto to allow endless duplication of identifiers in every data table right alongside the related program information.B They will also continue to allow the legitimate needs of epidemiology and security to trump the illegitimacy of the methods they use.
Privacy law will become progressively less relevant unless Identification, Authentication and Authorization are extracted from service programs and established as independent 'purpose(s)' in their own right.B
The Commmissioners must rejuvenate and enable privacy law to:
require identifiers to be stored in strict isolation from service information, allowing legitimate profilers (epidemiology and security) to do all the profiling they need on anonymous service data;
require them to obtain judicial permission before re-concatenating identifiers with alarming data patterns to identify potential surveillance targets;
and require them to notify the Court, or even the citizen targeted, after the danger has passed.
B
Legal constraints could then be similar to those required now for surveillance and search warrants.
Regards, pb
Peter Baril, Corporate Chief Information Officer
Government of Nunavut
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