What constitutes a privacy harm? For those of us covering data breaches and privacy breaches, there’s been a somewhat disturbing trend by courts to restrict the notion of “harm” to unreimbursed financial harm due to a breach. Worry, embarrassment, time lost, and increased risk of future harm are recognized as being consequences, but generally, plaintiffs…
Category: Breaches
UK: London councils use anti-terror law to catch charity shop donors
Miranda Bryant reports: London councils used anti-terror laws to snoop on residents more than 1,000 times in two years, it was revealed today. The figures, obtained by campaign group Big Brother Watch, also show that only 71 of the secret investigations under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act against Londoners between April 2008 and March…
NHTSA’s Complaint Database Leaks Private Information Like A Sieve
Edward Niedermeyer reports: Our Canadian pal carquestions took a look through NHTSA’s public complaint database, and found four examples of personal information that NHTSA should have redacted but didn’t. You know, things like names, birth dates, social security numbers, addresses, VINs, and drivers license numbers. And he found those four after searching through “12 or…
Ca: Third-party landlord organization collected, used and disclosed tenants’ personal information without their consent
PIPEDA Case Summary #2009-017 An advocate for tenants’ rights complained that, without obtaining proper consent, an organization was collecting, using and disclosing sensitive personal information about tenants for various purposes. This personal information was disclosed to the organization’s paying members (i.e., landlords). It was available from the organization’s web site, and, at one point, a…