NEWS – “without comment”
Alberta privacy law provisions limiting scope of “publicly available” information declared unconstitutional
Dentons – Canada
Takeaways:
- The Alberta privacy regulation which provides that “personal information contained in a publication” is “publicly available” – and can therefore be used without consent – can be interpreted to include information posted by individuals to the internet without using privacy settings, on social media platforms or otherwise.
- This has implications for the federal privacy law and the BC privacy law, which contain similar (but not identical) provisions.
- Nonetheless, the purpose for which such information is used must still be “reasonable” and organizations seeking to scrape images or other information from websites may still be caught by this portion of the analysis.
- Subject to copyright, terms of use, and the reasonableness of the purpose, organizations may now have greater access to personal information freely made public by individuals on the internet – at least, in Alberta.
- In addition, the scraping of the internet with a bot to gather images and information may be protected by the Charter’s s. 2(b) right to freedom of expression when such scraping is part of a process that leads to the conveyance of meaning.
Read the full Article at:
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=3c561d2f-888b-4c7e-8c78-685335a99716
Posted by: Ian (D. Withers)
www.WAPI.org