The Alberta Privacy Commissioner has ruled that a library which had installed keystroke logging software on an employee’s computer without his knowledge should not have done so. The library argued that the information collected was necessary to monitor the productivity of the employee but the Commissioner found that the library could have used less intrusive means to monitor the employee’s work and had made no effort to do so. | MORE 

Industry Canada publishes a Telecommunications Service Industry Reference Tool (Reference Tool), a frequently amended reference guide with an overview of economic activity in this industry sector in Canada. Recently, the section on the wireless sub-sector has been updated to reflect the rapid changes in that field. | MORE 

Recently a man was arrested in Florida on a third-degree felony charge of unauthorized access to a computer network for the relatively common practice of using someone else’s wireless network. Benjamin Smith III admitted to using the signal from Richard Dinon’s wireless network from Smith’s laptop while parked outside Dinon’s house. | MORE 

The Alberta Privacy Commissioner (Commissioner) has found two law firms engaged to advise on an M&A transaction to be in breach of Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA) when data was posted by the law firms to SEDAR, the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval. | MORE 

In the past six months, media headlines across North America have clamoured about privacy breaches at companies such as ChoicePoint, the San Jose Medical Group, Boston College and LexisNexis, to name a few. To the uninitiated, the timing and frequency of these breaches may suggest a sudden rash of poor information security practices, increasing sophistication of cyber-criminals, or both. In fact, these types of breaches are not so much new events, as they are the subject of new legal requirements for companies to report them. | MORE 

Canada recently became the first non-European country to sign a protocol against racism and xenophobic material on the Internet. | MORE