Legal Studies: Specialized in Information Law

INTRODUCTION The Internet has often been described as "borderless," owing to the technical features of Internet communications that make content accessible to anyone with a network connection, regardless of his or her location. This borderlessness has been widely ...

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada ("OPC") recently proposed that Canada's private sector privacy legislation should apply in modified form to search engines. The European Union ("EU") has required search engines to comply with its private sector data protection regime since the much-debated case regarding Google Spain in 2014. The EU and Canadian data protection authorities characterize search engines as commercial business ventures that collect, process, and package information, regardless of the public nature of their sources. Yet both also acknowledge that search engines serve important public interests by facilitating users' search for relevant information. This article considers specifically what a Canadian right to be forgotten might look like when it is seen as an opportunity to re-balance the values at stake in information flow. This article aims to bring Canada's existing legacy of balancing important values and interests regarding privacy and access to information to bear on our current information environment.

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1800047 ... Andrea Slane, “From Scanning to Sexting: The Scope of Protection of Dignity-based Privacy in Canadian Child Pornography Law”, Osgoode Hall Law Journal 48:3 (forthcoming, 2010). ... AFFILIATION: University of ...

The Canadian approach to privacy rights in one’s body is embedded in the relationship between interests in privacy, bodily integrity, and human dignity. Clarifying these interests is complicated by Canada’s middle-ground stance between the European “dignity-based” approach to privacy and the American “liberty-based” orientation. The Canadian approach is closest to the European model when intrusions upon the body are conceived as wholly or mostly non-consensual (e.g., strip searches, voyeurism, and most child pornography). However, once consent plays a potentially determinative role, the liberty-based approach gains ground. This reluctance to fully align dignity with privacy results in confusion about the scope of ongoing privacy interests in nude images, as evidenced by recent debates about the use of airport body-image scanners and the appropriate response to adolescent “sexting.” The author argues that a clearer alignment with a dignity-based approach emerging in Canadian child po...

The article takes the example of cross-jurisdictional defamation cases to examine how the idea of the Internet's "borderlessness" has spawned various narratives about the consequences of finding for or against defendants in these cases. The paper argues that the rhetorical functions of these narratives must be evaluated in relation to the legal principles called upon in each specific case, rather than allowing a particular narrative to hold sway more generally.

Revenge porn involves publicly releasing pictures of a person's sexual activity, along with the means to contact that person, to provoke widespread shaming. This paper analyzes the US-based revenge porn website MyEx.com through discourse, legal, and information network analyses. The paper explores how revenge porn is not only an instance of online sexual violence rooted in abjection but also symptomatic of a new political economy of subjectivity, where both the human-based and the automated, algorithm-based circulation of personal information are at the center of processes through which the self is seen and valued, both socially and economically, by others.

understanding of the positive domains of the human psychological experience. The third pillar, positive institutions and communities, is not as sturdy as presented in this volume. Elements of the environment-families, schools, communities-which support the development and maintenance of mental health, are not addressed as strongly. That is, while the text provides a fairly detailed sketch of the landscape of positive psychology, it does very little to describe the institutions that help to form and maintain that landscape. Psychiatrists might protest that this is the domain of sociologists or policy makers. However, child psychiatrists recognize the vital influence of family, culture, and the environment on the development of the brain and on adaptation throughout life. Reading the chapters in this volume with a child and adolescent psychiatrist's eyes allows us to penetrate the ideas and discover implications for the children whom we treat. For example, in ''Creativity and Genius,'' Cassandro and Simonton advance the puzzling argument that creative geniuses-luminaries as diverse as Michelangelo, Martha Graham, and Michael Jordan-are the ''architects of the flourishing society'' (p. 177) and that ''the candle of genius burns bright enough to illuminate a path toward maximizing the potential of all human beings'' (p. 178). While geniuses set the outside boundaries of human potential, we would argue that, in fact, it will be the parents and teachers, coaches and mentors, public health and policy makers, and, yes, even mental health professionals who will design the flourishing society by putting into place interventions that promote the development of thriving children, drawing in part from some of the research presented in this text. Further, it is far more likely to be the candle of effective public health interventions (not mere genius) that will ''illuminate a path toward maximizing the potential of all human beings.'' Indeed, as Ryff and Singer make clear in ''Flourishing Under Fire: Resilience as a Prototype of Challenged Thriving,'' ''the potential exists for improving the human condition by giving ever-greater segments of the population (particularly those suffering from disadvantage) the resources, insight, and behaviors needed to flourish, even under fire. A key direction of the future must thus be to incorporate more of these programs into the vision and practice of public health'' (p. 30). Flourishing provides a reasonably detailed map of the positive domains of the human condition. Mental health professionals who work with children and families will find much on which to build constructive ideas as they read the investigators' work collected in this book.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to obtain youth perspectives on consensual and non-consensual sexting. We began this study on young people’s (12–19) sexting practices in a large urban center. Before the study was put on pause due to COVID-19 physical distancing measures, we conducted 12 focus groups with 62 participants (47 girls, 15 boys). A key finding was that many girls had received unsolicited sexts (e.g., “dick pics”) or unwanted requests for sexts. Analysis revealed four interconnected themes: (1) unsolicited sexts; (2) unwanted requests for sexts; (3) complexity associated with saying “no”; and (4) general lack of adult support. Using our findings from before COVID-19, we discuss the potential impact of COVID-19 on teens’ sexting experiences and outline the ways in which social workers and other mental health practitioners can support adolescents and their parents in navigating this new context of sexting during and beyond the global pandemic.

The same would be true under a 'prescribed-by-seller' approach to the extent it would allow contractual choice-of-law and choice-of-forum provisions dictated by the seller to override the core protections afforded to consumers in their home country or their right to sue in a local court."). These concerns were raised in Michael Geist's seminal article on jurisdiction in online contract law in 2001, which the dissent in Douez v. Facebook, [2017] S.C.J. No. 33, 2017 SCC 33 (S.C.C.) [hereinafter "Douez"] cites, though not for these concerns: "... Consumers anxious to purchase online must also balance the promise of unlimited choice, greater access to information, and a more competitive global marketplace with the fact that they may not benefit from the security normally afforded by local consumer protection laws. Although such laws exist online, just as they do offline, their effectiveness is severely undermined if consumers do not have recourse within their local court system or if enforcing a judgment requires further proceedings in another jurisdiction.": Michael A. Geist, "Is There a There There? Toward Greater Certainty for Internet Jurisdiction" (2001) 16:3 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 1345, at 1347-48 [hereinafter "Geist"]. See also Geist, id., at 1357-58, where he discusses both legislative efforts and inconsistent court rulings on enforcement of forum selection clauses in consumer contracts already in the early days of the popular Internet.