The focus of our submission is the privacy portion of FOIPPA. In particular we wish to call the attention of The Special Committee to the vast citizen data aggregation projects currently underway in British Columbia and the urgent need to update the privacy protections of FOIPPA in light of the unprecedented threats to citizen privacy found in the developing infrastructure for massive data linkages between numerous government ministries.
In a democracy, the citizen is sovereign. A very effective way to gauge the health of a democracy is to look at how much privacy is afforded to citizens and how much transparency is required by the government. Our democracy has been under attack in these realms for some time, especially in light of hegemonic notions of “national security” that have been used to argue for ever greater governmental secrecy and wholesale intrusions into citizens’ private lives. This would be of serious concern in any era, but with emerging technologies added to the mix, there is now an urgent imperative to re-examine existing privacy legislation in order to create an effective privacy regime for this new environment.
