On November 27, 2023, a federal trial court in California ruled on a motion to dismiss a complaint involving a website that included videos and social media features.  The court found for the defendant and dismissed the class action complaint

A recent social media trend that has exploded in the past couple years is the use of “short-form videos.” Short-form videos are short in length—typically ranging from a few seconds to a few minutes—and feature a wide variety of topics

Privacy concerns continue to cast a shadow over social media companies where third party applications utilize and integrate their applications on their platforms. In the decision of Canada (Privacy Commissioner) v. Facebook, Inc., 2023 FC 533, the Federal Court dismissed

By Dan Daniele

Bill C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022 seeks to bring “safety and trust” to the forefront of Canada’s evolving digital sphere, according to  the Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Francois-Philippe Champagne, who introduced this bill on June 16, 2022. Bill C-27 promises to update and strengthen Canadian privacy law, govern the responsible development and use of artificial intelligence (“AI”), and continue implementing the principles of Canada’s Digital Charter.  As social media companies deal with large volumes of personal data and are increasingly relying on AI systems, these companies and their consumers will surely experience the impacts of this bill if it becomes law. In Europe, where privacy laws are stringent, social media companies have already faced significant fines for data misuse.

Self-isolation, stay-at-home orders, and lockdowns have changed the way we live during the COVID-19 pandemic. As many of us work remotely, limit face-to-face interactions, and stay indoors, we are reaching for our smartphones more and increasing our mobile app use. Mobile app usage increased by 40% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2020, hitting an all-time high of over 200 billion hours of app usage in April. The average user is spending 4 hours and 20 minutes per day on their smartphones, frequently on social media.

Apps for games, entertainment, photo and video sharing, business, health and fitness, shopping, digital payments, and medical based apps all saw app usage growth since the pandemic started. As our app usage increases, so does our information sharing. We share our game scores on one social media platform. We share photos and videos on another social media platform . We even share the distance we ran or biked, and how many calories we burned. But we don’t share things such as banking information, passwords, and our medical information, or do we? As we increase our app use we need to think about the risks to privacy.

On November 17, 2020, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, Navdeep Bains, tabled proposed legislation in Parliament that aims to overhaul Canada’s data privacy law. Bill C-11, entitled An Act to enact the Consumer Privacy Protection Act and the Personal Information and Data Protection Tribunal Act and to make consequential and related amendments to other Act, will create new data privacy obligations and new enforcement mechanisms for these obligations if it becomes law.

As the second wave of COVID-19 spreads across Canada, the use of COVID-19 tracing apps is on the rise. For example, the Government of Canada released COVID Alert – an app using Bluetooth technology to help people report positive diagnoses, and control the spread of the virus. The success of the app depends on a high quantity of users, but concerns over privacy and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in analyzing the data may hinder that objective.