Online safety for kids (video)

February 26, 2013

online safetyFrom one parent to another, I discuss in this video how you can better protect your children in respect of their online activities. Children talk a lot on social media platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), so if you are not on those platforms, I encourage you to learn more.  Please watch this video to learn a few safety tips <<click here>>


Supreme Court issues groundbreaking workplace privacy decision: Interview with Charles Adler (AUDIO)

October 26, 2012

Last week the Supreme Court of Canada delivered a groundbreaking decision (Her Majesty the Queen v. Richard Cole) that will have significant implications for workplace privacy rights of employees in Canada. In its decision the SCC declared that employees have an expectation of privacy with regard to personal information contained on workplace computers where the personal use of such computers is permitted or reasonably expected. To learn more please click here>> to listen to my interview with Charles Adler of CJOB|68 radio in which we discuss this important decision.


Manitoba Ombudsman News Release

September 14, 2012

Acting Manitoba Ombudsman Mel Holley has released an investigation report with recommendations under PHIA regarding snooping in electronic health records.

Read more, click here>>


What the heck is social media law? (video)

July 23, 2012

It’s one of the newest and most rapidly evolving areas of law, social media law. In this short video, I discuss the area of law and the types of services that Pitblado Law is providing to clients.


Dealing with privacy complaints (video)

May 23, 2012

Has your organization received a privacy complaint from one of your customers or employees?  Privacy complaints are occurring more frequently these days because of new privacy laws and increasing privacy compliance expectations from customers and employees.  In this brief video, I chat about how your organization can best respond to privacy complaints. Hope it helps.


Privacy Breaches: Obligations and Pending Changes to PIPEDA (Video)

March 23, 2012

Has one of your organization’s employees lost their iPhone or Blackberry recently?  How about misplaced a file?  If those devices or files contain personal information, you may have suffered a privacy breach.  To learn more about how to deal with a privacy breach please watch this short video – click here>>


Internet cached webpages: What are they and how can you deal with them?

March 15, 2012

During the course of my practice I’m often asked to provide social media law advice, typically to organizations or individuals who want defamatory, proprietary or privacy invasive content removed from the Internet.  Once content has been successfully removed from a website I often discuss with clients issues related to Internet cached webpages.  So I thought it would be helpful to provide some general information on what Internet cached webpages are and how you can deal with them in situations where you don’t want to have certain content available online.

What are Internet cached webpages? 

When search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing crawl a website, they take a snapshot of what the site looks like at that time. This “snapshot” is known as a cached webpage and it’s stored by the search engine. The cached webpage is what the search engine then uses to determine whether the site matches a user’s specific query.

When a user clicks on the cached webpage, they will be taken to the version of the webpage that was online when the site was last crawled and not the current version. The cached webpage can be accessed when the current version of the site is unavailable due to Internet congestion, a slow website, or the webpage has recently been removed.

How can you deal with Internet cached webpages?

It is very difficult to remove a cached webpage from a search engine if you’re not the webmaster of the website. If you’re not the webmaster and you’d like a cached page removed from Google, Yahoo or Bing, you have three options:

  1. You can contact the site administrator and ask them to take the steps necessary to have the cached webpage removed from the search engine in question. Google typically responds to such requests from webmasters within 2-3 hours and Yahoo typically responds in 5 hours;
  2. You can seek a court order or other legal document to have certain content removed from the website/cached webpage; or
  3. You can just wait until the search engine crawls the site again and updates its cached webpages. This option can take the longest amount of time to see results since it might be 1-2 months before the site is crawled again.

Google offers an additional tool to have a cached webpage removed by a party who does not own the webpage in question. My understanding is that this process will only work for HTML pages and will not work for PDFs or .doc files):

  1. The webpage must be have been updated since the cached version;
  2. Go to (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663691) and click on Google Public URL Removal Tool;
  3. Sign in to Google;
  4. Then it will prompt you for the URL you’d like removed;
  5. Click Continue;
  6. Type a word that appears on the out-of-date cached version of the page but not anywhere on the live version. Its better to use single words and not phrases; and
  7. Click Remove cache.

Given the technical nature of this topic, and fact that I’m not a techie, I’d recommend that you work with a technology professional and not rely on this post. That being said I hope this helps and at least provides you with some general information to get you started.


Spy-cam found in local swimming pool change room: Interviews

March 14, 2012

I was recently interviewed by CTV Rajeev Dhir and CBC Megan Benedictson regarding a pen-shaped ‘spy’ video camera discovered in the staff change room of a Winnipeg public swimming pool. Check out the links above if the story if of interest to you.


Interview with Maritime Morning — Weekend Edition News 95.7 // News 88.9 // News 91.9

March 6, 2012

I recently had an interview with Erin Trassord of Maritime Morning, a local radio station in Halifax, regarding Google’s new Privacy Policy.  To listen, click here


Google’s new privacy policy

March 2, 2012

I recently did an interview with CTV’s Ina Sindhu on questions arising over Google’s new privacy policy.  To watch, click on the link in the CTV news video player heading “CTV’s Ina Sidhu on questions arising over internet privacy due to Google’s policy change“.


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