Study Says DRM Violates Canadian Privacy Laws

inkslinger77 writes "DRM technology used in consumer media may be violating Canadian privacy laws, according to a new report. The study, done by University of Ottawa's Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, found that a number of services like iTunes, Visio, and Symantec's North SystemWorks require too much personal information in order to verify their users. 'Another issue cited by [study lead investigator David Fewer] concerned the disclosure of DRM-collected personal information from users of Intuit's QuickTax software."It wasn't the use of QuickTax itself that triggered the concern, but rather the use of Intuit's online filing service where we found buried in one of the disclosures the notice that, as an international corporation, Intuit would send information across the border," Fewer said.'"

Could this apply in the European Community too?

[MichaelCrawford]

The EC has quite stringent privacy laws, particularly regarding storage of personal info in databases, and has a record of filing anti-corporate lawsuits.

Nice thought, but...

[allcar]

Who's going to pay to find out if this is true. Just because an academic study says it might be the case, proves nothing. A costly law suit will be needed to do that. Any volunteers?

Re:Nice thought, but...

[erbmjw]

IANAL but I believe that "noncompliance of PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act)" does not require a volunteer to take the infringing companies to court.
I believe that the Canadian government ( The Canadian privacy commissioner } can undertake an investigation and {where required} apply significant pressure on the infringing companies.

Canadian Tariffs & International Jurisdiction?

[aldheorte]

Somewhat unrelated questions of curiosity: Since if you buy blank media in Canada, you apparently pay a tariff to make up for sharing, does that mean you could buy blank media from Canada from another country and distribute whatever you want on it, claiming that you paid the copyright fee by virtue of the Canadian tariff, especially if you were giving it away for free? In similar fashion, does Canadian privacy law extend to non-Canadian citizens buying DRMed items? If so, what's the thing that determines what is a purchase that is "Canadian"? Location of server in Canada? Use of Candadian domain or online store customized to Canada? Physical location of purchaser? Billing address of purchaser? ISP or IP address of user (and what about proxy or VPN services)? All of the above? Seems like on the Internet whatever country creates the most beneficial tax and rights protection to the consumer could rapidly find itself with a whole lot of virtual citizens if there's an easy way to extend its jurisdiction.

Re:Borders

[GNU(slash)Nickname]

...the company could be compelled to turn our information over to the eff-bee-eye or the en-essay or one of those other alphabet agencies they've got down there, and it's illegal for them to tell us (their customer) when this takes place.

I used to work for a Global 50 company. We had a project underway to consolidate all of the Exchange mailboxes in North America into a single data centre in the US, but wound up pulling out of the project and building a smaller Canadian data centre instead for exactly this reason.