We must welcome the recent signing of a memorandum of understanding between the principal Canadian authorities in the protection of personal information. This illustrates one of the avenues that law enforcement agencies should take. While goods and services are offered in online environments that ignore territorial borders, public bodies too often remain confined to territorial and jurisdictional shackles. States operate in a vacuum. They impose limits on themselves that compartmentalize their capacities to act. The organization that protects consumers does not know what the organization that protects the privacy of these same consumers is doing. The examples could be multiplied.
To protect people in connected environments, we need mechanisms and regulations adapted to the situations that are deployed in the network. Laws have often been designed to address specific issues and apply within defined geographic territories.
Thus, the organizations responsible for applying the laws protecting citizens, consumers, children and vulnerable people operate in a vacuum. Too often, the organization in one territory is unaware of what its counterpart in the neighboring territory is doing. This need for cooperation is particularly important in environments that transcend both territorial borders and sectors of activity. For example, social networks can be used to broadcast television programs as well as to sell used clothes or cryptocurrency or even support the non-consensual transmission of intimate images.
With regard to the protection of privacy, the recently signed protocol commits the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec to cooperate with the other personal information protection authorities of Canada, Alberta and British Columbia. British. They will be able to exchange and consult on problems of application of the various laws, discuss policies and develop tools for public awareness and compliance. The goal is to maximize the capacity and impact of law enforcement activities and increase knowledge sharing.
This kind of cooperation will allow more flexibility to address common issues on emerging privacy issues. On the occasion of the signing of this protocol, Diane Poitras, president of the Commission d’accès à l’information du Québec, recalled that collaboration in the application of laws on the protection of personal information is essential. In a world where data transcends borders, there is a need to simplify investigative processes and seek greater harmonization in law enforcement.
For activities that take place in spaces that transcend borders, it is counterproductive to maintain law enforcement processes operating in silos.
We must avoid each organization having to start over in its own corner with investigations and procedures in order to elucidate situations that are taking place in different territories, but which often concern the same citizens.
From the vacuum to the network
In 2020, the Yale report noted that the new networked space, in which everything is connected in an environment of ambient intelligence, requires a different conception of the functioning of organizations responsible for applying the laws. The lines of separation between sectors of activity, once delimited in a vacuum, are blurring. New types of problems and risks must be addressed. For example, the data collected thanks to the ability to compile the smallest facts and gestures of everything that takes place on the Internet obviously presents challenges for individuals, but it also presents challenges for several other types of actors. The way social network algorithms process content has implications for privacy, but also for the application of laws against discrimination or harassment.
Obviously, personal data concerns an individual, but once it is consolidated, it also presents other challenges. The data collected from individuals has a significant potential for intrusion into their privacy. But these same data are aggregated and processed with others to produce all sorts of services, for example, interactive traffic maps. Other services may process data with processes that have discriminatory or other exclusionary effects.
These are questions relating to competition law, consumer protection, the right to privacy, public safety imperatives and taxation. They must be approached accordingly. They transcend the scope of sectoral laws and often go beyond the specific mandate of the various regulatory bodies.
The realities are more and more encompassing. They challenge the traditional categories that compartmentalize public bodies. Law enforcement can no longer be restrained by the limits of a compartmentalized vision of the law inherited from the time when networks were the exception. To have the ability to intervene in realities that unfold in a network, you have to work in a network.