The federal Privacy Commissioner has just released a report giving guidance on the privacy implications of police wearing body-worn cameras, and what police need to do to comply with privacy laws.

It points out that the issues around body-worn cameras are more complex than on fixed cameras.

As is usually the case with privacy issues, it is about balance – in this case balancing the advantages of the cameras with privacy concerns.

The report has this to say about balance:

There are various reasons why a LEA might contemplate adopting BWCs. LEAs could view the use of BWCs as bringing . . . [more]

There has been a big kerfuffle in the last few days over the thought that Samsung smart TV’s are listening to and recording TV watcher’s conversations via their voice command feature. That arose from a clause in their privacy policy that said in part “…if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”

Samsung has since clarified this language to explain that some voice commands may be transmitted to third parties to convert the command to text and make . . . [more]

Background

The pervasiveness of “smart” technology was envisioned in part as far back as 1954 by Harold Osborne, who predicted we would all get a telephone number for life at birth.

When society adopts new technology, social institutions, including the courts, often take time to catch up with it. This was referred to as “cultural lag” by William Ogburn in 1959, who stated,

When material conditions change, changes are occurred in the adaptive culture. But these changes in the adaptive culture do not synchronize exactly with the change in material culture. There is a lag, which may last for

As I like to tell users who come to my library, law reform commission reports can be a legal researcher’s best friend.

Law commissions consult widely with stakeholders, they may compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with the same problem that has you stumped and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few recently released reports that caught my attention.

• Law Reform Commission of Ireland Issues Paper on Cyber-Crime and Cyber-Bullying: “The Commission seeks the views of interested parties on the following 5 issues: 1. Whether the harassment offence in section 10 of the

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. Canadian Appeals Monitor 2. BC Injury Law And ICBC Claims Blog 3. FamilyLLB 4. DroitDu.net 5. Clio Blog

Canadian Appeals Monitor
What tangled webs we weave: The BCCA provides guidance on the tort of deceit and exclusion of liability clauses

The British Columbia Court of Appeal’s decision in Roy . . . [more]

Each Wednesday we tell you which three English-language cases and which French-language case have been the most viewed* on CanLII and we give you a small sense of what the cases are about.

For this last week:

1. The Hearing Clinic (Niagara Falls) Inc. v. 866073 Ontario Limited, et al., 2014 ONSC 5831

[3] I have found it impossible to articulate a helpful overview of this trial. Sitting atop the evidence here is like scaling a very, very high mountain only to find that, when one reaches the summit, one is too far from everything to see anything. . . . [more]

The first technology column I wrote for Slaw was called Robot Law. In those days, the main uses of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) – aka drones – were military, either for reconnaissance or for attack. Since then, civilian uses have expanded, and the technology has evolved to serve them. Individuals can readily buy drones the size of insects or the size of a microwave oven or larger. Commercial versions can be the size of small aircraft.

Among the many peaceful uses of drones are surveying, especially of hard-to-access or remote lands and installations like . . . [more]

Each Monday we present brief excerpts of recent posts from five of Canada’s award­-winning legal blogs chosen at random* from sixty recent Clawbie winners. In this way we hope to promote their work, with their permission, to as wide an audience as possible.

This week the randomly selected blogs are 1. SOQUIJ  2. FamilyLLB 3. Canadian Privacy Law Blog  4. Double Aspect  5. FP Legal Post

SOQUIJ
La protection de l’image d’une personne est associée au respect du droit à sa vie privée

Il y aura violation au droit à l’image, en tant que composante du droit au respect de . . . [more]

Much of the debate following the shootings in Ottawa and Saint-Jean-sur-le-Richelieu has turned on whether or not increased surveillance by Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies could have prevented the actions of Michael Zehaf-Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau. Then comes the follow-up: Must we adopt stronger measures and would they put our civil liberties at risk?

To be clear, this has nothing to do with the recent tabling of Bill C-44, drafted months ago. For reasons well explained by Craig Forcese, these measures aim primarily to assist CSIS in obtaining warrants for overseas investigations and to help protect the identity . . . [more]

Every week we present the summary of a decision handed down by a Québec court provided to us by SOQUIJ and considered to be of interest to our readers throughout Canada. SOQUIJ is attached to the Québec Department of Justice and collects, analyzes, enriches, and disseminates legal information in Québec.

PÉNAL (DROIT) : Le requérant, qui a été déclaré non criminellement responsable pour cause de troubles mentaux du meurtre de ses deux jeunes enfants à l’issue d’un procès tenu devant jury, est remis en liberté en attendant de subir un nouveau procès.

Intitulé : Turcotte c. R., 2014 QCCS 4285 . . . [more]

My previous column gave a number of examples of how governments, regulators and even spies focus on intermediaries to achieve what they want. The intermediaries used may or may not be online themselves, though most of the examples involved Internet Service Providers and web hosting services.

This column reviews the policy questions, though without attempting any definitive answers. Feel free to propose your own answers in the Comments, or raise further questions, or improve my analysis.

Approaches to liability

Three major approaches are taken to the role of intermediaries, as we saw in the previous column (without so classifying them): . . . [more]

The legal memos from 2004, over a decade ago, outlining the power of the President to use wiretapping, have been obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The project was called Stellar Wind, and allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect information, even when it was contained in the U.S., as long as one end of the communications was overseas and a party was believed to be connected to terrorism.

Jack Goldsmith, Assistant Attorney General at the time, wrote in a memo from May 2004,

…the