Doing privacy day to day is, I think, a bit more complicated than what the average person thinks.  For sure, it’s relatively easy to learn the 10 privacy principles, but when you actually get into the weeds a bit, operationalizing those principles is fraught with interpretation and well, quite frankly, sometimes we can get it wrong.

And, sometimes our privacy laws are more clear — leaving less to interpretation — but still making it difficult, because mistakes can happen.  Remember the breach experienced even by the OPC itself?

Well, your privacy association isn’t perfect either ... yesterday, while trying to comply with Canada’s anti-spam legislation, a coding error crept in and we accidentally sent a consent confirmation email to a batch of existing members.  And, while CASL isn’t always the easiest piece of privacy legislation to figure out, there is consensus that the IAPP didn’t need to send out a consent confirmation request to existing members.

It’s not the biggest deal in the world obviously, but it just goes to show you that people who take privacy very seriously can get it wrong sometimes too. Mistakes do happen.

This is a round-about way of me wishing you a Happy Canada Day ... See? CASL came into force July 1, which is what is prompting the consent confirmation requests to nonmembers, and all of it relates directly to celebrating the country we call home.  Did you see the news about how Canada ranked No. 2 in the world and the only thing holding us back was that not enough of us are using mobile devices?  It’s probably because we value our privacy. Go figure. 

Have a great long weekend.  Go out and enjoy your extra-long weekend, as well as some beaver tails and fireworks!