A recent survey from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) shows a disturbing trend that online surveillance often happens without transparent judicial oversight, and yet appears to be raising relatively little concern among the public. As a result, the CIRA, which is the organization that manages the .CA Internet domain, is calling for a national dialogue on online privacy.

Is it still news when an organization relaunches its website? The Ontario Bar Association has just relaunched its website with a more social, interactive focus:

When we set out on this journey, we wanted to provide real, tangible value to our members. We’ve boosted opportunity for engagement with the OBA through social media integration, member directories, practice section landing pages, private forums, and the volunteer portal. Check out all the new features available to you through the new OBA.ORG.

They have put together a short video to introduce the changes:

The new oba.org from Ontario Bar Association on Vimeo. . . . [more]

I am impressed with the sharing aspect of Canada’s legal community, and the generosity everyone shows in blogging. Every day we see great new examples of this with both thought leadership and informational blogs. On Friday members of the CALL-L listserv received a note from the CALL/ACBD Website Editorial Board chair Michel-Adrien Sheppard reminding us about the blog on the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit website.

Even as a CALL/ACBD executive board member I didn’t quite realize how much blogging was going on inside the members’ area! Fortunately now members have the option of . . . [more]

The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia has published another document to help businesses improve online privacy practices. This comes after an August 2013 report from Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN) that shows B.C. companies have work to do to make their privacy policies clear and accessible to the public.

Data about individuals is very valuable. It can be used to discern trends, popular thought, individual buying habits, customer behaviour, do medical research, and many other things. But it is important that the collectors and users of that data use it in a privacy friendly manner.

One of the deflections by the NSA is that they don’t record conversations, just metadata about phone calls and other communication. Metadata means information about information, and can be just as personal and invasive as the data itself.

The Ontario Privacy Commissioner, Ann Cavoukian, recently published a paper entitled A Primer on Metadata: Separating . . . [more]

Can a member of the public post a tweet about a sentencing hearing as it is taking place in a Canadian courtroom? It depends on which court and in which province, but in most of Canada the answer is no. And what about checking email during the course of a long-winded closing submission? The answer, is yes, in most jurisdictions, but only if you’re a legal profession insider.

The Canadian Centre for Court Technology (“CCCT”) has posted a Canada Wide Summary of Court Policies on Live, Text-Based Communications from the Courtroom as of June 2013. The Summary confirms what Dean . . . [more]

The Cyber-safety Act, SNS 2013, c 2 came into effect in Nova Scotia this week. This act followed a high profile case of cyber-bullying that occurred in the province that was the final straw, so to speak, that led to a high profile report and the legislature to act with the creation of this act.

The act has some interesting points that should be intriguing playing out in case law. It establishes Cyber-bullying as tort where the victim can sue the perpetrator and more interestingly, is that if a minor commits cyber-bullying this act allows the victims to sue . . . [more]

In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, turned 3 this week.

Since August 2010, a team of bloggers has been busily blogging about anything legal:

“Some posts are interesting things we see in the news that have a legal angle, some are interviews with staff, many are about the Law Library, and others are photos from here and law libraries around the world. Some are a bit more off beat than others.”

The Law Library of Congress is the world’s largest law library, with a collection of over 2.65 million volumes  . . . [more]

There has been a great deal of buzz over Jeff Bezos’s recent purchase of The Washington Post for a fraction of what Facebook paid for Instagram, and also a fraction of what Yahoo paid for Tumblr. How can it be that a venerable old newspaper, guardian of the right of the public to know, with hundreds of employees and thousands of square feet of bricks and mortar be worth far less than smaller companies that simply deal with code?

If lawyers ever needed another reason to believe that the world has changed. This is it.

In my view, it . . . [more]

Some interesting news Monday, when it was announced that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will purchase The Washington Post. Amazon won’t have an interest in the paper, however. It’s an all-Bezos investment; and one has to wonder what plans he has in store.

At this point in the Internet’s evolution, platforms are obviously ‘king’. Companies like Facebook and Google (and Amazon) are hyper-focused on being destinations, and owning a layer of web activity that controls user participation for extended periods.

Is Bezos looking to add an influential news property to this mix? If it was that straight forward, one would . . . [more]

In a conversation the other day we touched on the differences between how (or if) electronic legal research was taught when I was in law school, and then a few years later when I first instructed legal research and writing. We recalled the equipment, manuals, and peripherals the publisher(s) sent us, and a perception of their complexity.

Serendipitously, the same day, I noticed Sarah Glassmeyer of CALI wrote on LLRX about an idea to collect those old things and more.

Note: It’s not that she’s a hoarder. Sarah happens to want to collect and preserve “our shared legal technology . . . [more]

We have a love/hate view of behavioural advertising (tracking and targeting of individuals’ web activities, across sites and over time, in order to serve advertisements that are tailored to those individuals’ inferred interests).

On the one hand, if we are going to be served up ads on the web, it is better (for both viewers and advertisers) to be served ads that are relevant to the viewer’s interests. On the other hand, it can be rather creepy to think we are being tracked, especially if there are profiles of us being stored somewhere, and especially if those profiles contain information . . . [more]