Federal Anti-Spam And Privacy Amendment Bills Presented

Yesterday, the federal government presented two long awaited bills in the House of Commons:

• Bill C-28 - Fighting Internet and Wireless Spam Act
• Bill C-29 - Safeguarding Canadians’ Personal Information Act

Slaw.ca has already published analyses of the legislative proposals:

• FISA - New Anti-Spam Bill Introduced (David Canton, May 26, 2010): "One thing I find interesting is that the volume of the messages does not seem to be important. In other words, 1 email or text message to 1 recipient can be considered spam. One of the exceptions is a message 'that is sent by or on behalf of an individual to another individual with whom they have a personal or family relationship, as defined in the regulations.' (...) We will have to consider carefully how it applies to what we as lawyers and our clients do that will be caught by this. To some extent, the regulations will be important. For example, will a 'personal relationship' include a situation where I meet someone at a social or networking event or meeting who might be a potential client, and then follow up later with an email to that person? When the bill gets passed (from what I’ve seen there is a good chance it will be), and the regulations get drafted, we will have to take some time to figure out in more detail how this affects things that well intentioned businesses (and lawyers) do that they don’t consider to be spam."
• Overview of Proposed PIPEDA Amendments (David Fraser, May 26, 2010): "Bill C-29 is the long-awaited government response to the five year mandatory review of PIPEDA [Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act] and contains a number of very significant amendments that, if passed, will alter the landscape of privacy law compliance in Canada. At a very high level, it provides mandatory breach notification for security breaches related to personal information, attempts to clarify the confusing “lawful authority” provisions in Section 7 and also facilitates the disclosure of customer and employee information in connection with business transactions. This post will attempt to summarize the significant amendments ..."