Since the early 2000s, one of the ways in which the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada advances their mandate is to fund what they call the “Contributions Program.”
The idea is that nonprofit organizations apply and a handful of them receive a certain amount of funding to conduct arms-length research. Over the years, there’s been some pretty cutting-edge work out of it and I’ve used this space in the Digest before to try and bring some attention to the program and some of its results.
I’m doing this again today because I noticed that yesterday the OPC posted the completed projects for their latest cycle of research projects for 2021-2022. You can peruse all the projects here and I hope you do.
The 2021-2022 cycle of projects had a theme: Protecting privacy in an increasingly digitalized world. Among the projects you might be interested in exploring, for example: a study of privacy and security risks of applications designed for the elderly, a game to help young people understand the impact of algorithms on their lives, the rate of privacy protectiveness of proctoring online exams and more.
Back in June, you might remember that the OPC announced the funding recipients for the 2022-2023 cycle and the focus of the studies underway right now are about understanding how “privacy affects diverse groups of people differently and to explore the range of privacy-related experiences, barriers and inequalities in this area.” I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of this next year. I expect it will be interesting.
In the meantime, if you are a non-governmental organization interested in privacy-related research — and I know a few of you subscribe to this Digest — I’d keep my eyes peeled for an announcement from the OPC about the next round of funding. Perhaps I should have just asked them when it’s coming out, but they seem to usually do this in November or December so it could be imminent.
Anyway, privacy is one of those issues where there's no shortage of new things to learn and explore, right? So with that, I’ll ask you to first read the clips we’ve gathered for you before you dive into reading those different projects.
On that note, have a great weekend!