Category Archives: Privacy
The Anatomy of Lawful Access Phone Records
The aim of this post is to make clear just how much information is contained in a single lawful access “phone record”, demonstrating that the government is seeking information that grossly exceeds what is contained in the white or yellow pages today. As a result, I first provide an example phone record that resembles those in every phonebook in Canada and then offer an example of a lawful access record. Continue reading
Lawful Access, Its Potentials, and Its Lack of Necessity
Police and other authorities should not be permitted to infringe upon Canadians’ rights and further erode expectations of communicative privacy, associative privacy, or basic dignities on the basis of cross-jurisdictional envy. Continue reading
Mobile Security and the Economics of Ignorance
Commissioners and regulators must demand that device manufacturers either provide APIs that comply with Canadian law or change existing APIs in the face of prevalent privacy issues. Where neither of these conditions are met, OS vendors should be forced to suffer significant penalties. The only way to secure devices’ security and citizens’ privacy is to erode the economics of ignorance that application vendors and device manufacturers alike depend on to cheat Canadians out of their personal information. Continue reading
Review: Islands of Privacy
Ultimately, Nippert-Eng has provided a real contribution to the literature by making available years of empirical research and reaffirming conclusions that the literature has come to by way of theorization. In this way, Islands of Privacy offers strong empirical support for existing theoretical work, better grounding scholarly work and offering novel ways of articulating issues and problems that scholars have grappled with for decades. If you are invested in the sociological analysis of privacy and surveillance, or are looking for strong empirical grounding for some abstract theorizations of either, then this is a good book to add to your library. Continue reading
