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August 4 2016

Federal Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien Calls for Privacy act Update

"Daniel Therrien used his opening keynote address to announce a new sweeping consultation on the nature of consent and to call for an update to the ""archaic"" Privacy Act that covers the handling of citizen data. The consent consultation is an ""important exercise,"" Therrien said, because PIPEDA ""predates smart phones, cloud computing, and business models predicated on unlimited access to information and automated processes that use algorithms to make decisions. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner released a position paper that presents a sort of state of the state for consent, identifying troubling issues for the current consent model in PIPEDA and offering up a suite of possible solutions. Many are calling, Therrien noted, for accountability frameworks and ethics boards and other methods for organizations to assess privacy risk and make use decisions without the explicit consent of the data owners. ""We have a fundamentally changed privacy landscape. We are at a critical point where action is needed."""