The Precedent Blog reports that four University of Ottawa law students have filed a complaint with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada over alleged poor privacy practices by social networking site Facebook. The students are working with The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa. On May 30th CIPPIC filed a 35-page complaint under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) against Facebook, alleging 22 separate violations of the Act.

According to the Press Release from CIPPIC:

A team of law students, some of whom are dedicated Facebook users,

Ted Tjaden sparked a good discussion here on whether lists of links are useful on a firm’s intranet. But whether or not your useful links live in such a corporate location, there has to be a way to record URLs that interest you. Of course, each browser has a bookmarks feature, replete with the ability to create folders and to organize them according to your own sense of order. But, as the post on ReadWriteWeb says, you don’t always want to clutter up your more-or-less permanent list with ephemera — those sites that you think might be interesting to look . . . [more]

There’s a good little piece from Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP on the legal state of play when it comes to taking your laptops and PDAs across the U.S.-Canada border. “Electronic Devices and Borders – A Privacy-Free Zone?” by Edmonton Associate Dana Bissoondatt cites chapter and verse and mentions as well that Canada has taken up the practice of peeping, it seems.

We’ve broached this topic before on Slaw in
Laptops and Cross-Border Security, and
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Resources. . . . [more]

Adobe has done what was clearly on the cards: it’s bundled a number of the web apps it’s been gathering over the past months and is calling the unified collection Acrobat.com.

There you’ll find: the beautiful word processor, Buzzword; Adobe ConnectNow — which ZDNet esteems to be the killer app in the bunch — which lets you collaborate online, sharing your screen, etc.; Share, which enables just that; My Files, the storage place; and PDF Converter, the only disappointing aspect, which gives you the right to convert a grand total of 5 (five) files to PDFs. Clearly Adobe is . . . [more]

Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson point out in the May 29th FIR Cut of their public relations and technology podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that the Canadian government has a contract with Open Text to develop social networking tools for its quarter of a million employees.

The May 27, 2008 news release on the Open Text website indicates this a renewal of their enterprise content management (ECM) system currently used by 58 federal government departments and agencies. What is new are the implementation of Web 2.0 capabilities:

The contract will also enable the Canadian Federal Government