David P. Ball reports:
Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a little-reported executive order from U.S. President Donald Trump that may endanger the privacy of Canadians’ personal information — and possibly even B.C. residents’ medical data handled by a U.S. firm, they warn.
The Jan. 25 decree, which excludes non-U.S. residents’ “personally identifiable information” from U.S. privacy laws, was hidden amongst a raft of controversial reforms Trump signed in his first week in office.
[…]
According to the executive order on domestic security, U.S. agencies must “ensure that their privacy policies exclude persons who are not United States citizens or lawful permanent residents from the protections of the Privacy Act regarding personally identifiable information.”
That raises major red flags for B.C. Civil Liberties Association’s policy director Micheal Vonn, “amounting to something very, very concerning” for Canadians.
Read more on Metro.
As others have noted, however, the executive order is talking about the Privacy Act, and it won’t impact data transfers under the EU-US Privacy Shield. But what about US-Canada transfers? Is there cause for concern here? I hope some Canadian privacy lawyers and scholars share their analyses of implications.