Teresa Scassa - Blog

“Privacy by the Wayside: The New Information Superhighway, Data Privacy, and the Deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems”, (2011) 74 University of Saskatchewan Law Review 117-164 (with Jennifer Chandler and Elizabeth F. Judge)

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) integrate vehicles and surface transportation infrastructure with information, communication, and sensory technologies to improve the safety, efficiency, security, service, accessibility, environmental responsibility, and reliability of the transportation system. The term ITS covers a very broad range of transport-related activities involving federal, provincial, and municipal governments as well as private sector actors. In its broadest sense, ITS enables an integrated and intelligent network of services for both public and private transportation systems. In this article, we discuss the data protection and privacy issues raised by the use of ITS in Canada.  We begin with an overview identifying the central privacy issues that arise with ITS. We then provide an introduction to the legal and institutional privacy framework in Canada. This is followed by a closer analysis of Canada’s data protection regimes and their application to ITS. 

“Data Protection, Privacy and Spatial Data”, in R. Devillers & H. Goodchild, eds. Proceedings of the 6^th International Symposium on Spatial Data Quality, Taylor & Francis, 2009, pp. 211-220 (with Lisa Campbell)

In this paper, we explore the extent to which spatial data may be considered personal information for the purposes of data protection and privacy law. While data quality is an important objective in the creation of spatial data applications, we demonstrate that even relatively low quality spatial data may attract the application of data protection or privacy law, particularly when it is matched or combined with other data sets. The rapid development of a variety of applications and tools that incorporate spatial data pose significant privacy law challenges both for individuals and for the developers and users of these tools.