About the Research

Researchers

Stephanie Perrin

Co-investigator Stephanie Perrin recently successfully defended her doctoral dissertation: The Struggle for WHOIS Privacy: Understanding the Standoff Between ICANN and the World’s Data Protection Authorities under the supervision of Professor Clement at the University of Toronto.  She has been an active volunteer at ICANN for the past 5 years, participating in numerous working groups dealing with the WHOIS problem, having been recruited by ICANN to serve as a data protection expert on the Experts Working Group on Registration Data Services for generic top level domains (gTLDS) in 2013.  She is now and has been for the past three years an elected Councillor on the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the body that develops policy for ICANN, and is both a well-known figure at ICANN and well versed in the challenges for data protection. She has also been participating in the International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (IWGDPT or the Berlin group), who issued a recent paper which updated the 2000 Common Position on Directory Services at ICANN[1].Perrin had a lengthy career in the public service of Canada prior to embarking on her doctoral studies, including two years in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner as Director, Research and Policy (2005-2007), and was Director of Privacy Policy at Industry Canada responsible for the development of PIPEDA (1995-2000).  She was a key figure in the establishment of the CAN/CSA-830 standards development project (1991-96), working extensively with the CSA to raise funds, find interested stakeholders, and she served on the drafting committee which produced the Model Privacy Code. She then led efforts to get the standard accepted as an ISO standard, and promoted the standards approach to privacy issues throughout the 90s at the OECD and international fora.  While working for the leading Canadian privacy enhancing technology company Zero Knowledge Systems as Chief Privacy Officer, she led an initiative of the CEN/ISS to examine privacy standards in Europe as a means of achieving compliance with the EU data protection directive (the IPSE project) in 2001-2002. This effort received recognition by the Article 29 Working Party as a useful initiative to achieve privacy compliance.

Andrew Clement

Professor Emeritus, Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

Andrew Clement is a professor emeritus of information at the University of Toronto, where he has coordinated the Information Policy Research Program since the 1990s and co-founded the Identity Privacy and Security Institute (IPSI). With a PhD in Computer Science, he has had longstanding research and teaching interests in the social implications of information/communication technologies, community informatics, participatory design and privacy/surveillance. Among his recent research projects are: IXmaps.ca, an internet mapping tool that helps make more visible NSA mass internet surveillance activities and the routing of Canadian personal data through the U.S. and publishes privacy transparency reports on ISPs serving Canadian internet carriers serving Canadians; Seeing Through the Cloud, which examined extra-national outsourcing of eCommunications services, especially by universities; SurveillanceRights.ca, which documents (non)compliance of video surveillance installations with privacy regulations and helps citizens understand their related privacy rights; Snowden Surveillance Archives, an on-line searchable collection of all documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden subsequently published by news media; and Proportionate ID, which demonstrates through overlays for conventional ID cards and a smartphone app privacy protective alternatives to prevailing full disclosure norms. Clement was the principal investigator of the 4 year Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN) project and lead editor of its collective Connecting Canadians: Investigations in Community Informatics book. Clement was a co-investigator in the seven year major research collaboration, The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting and contributor to its Transparent Lives: Surveillance in Canada book. Currently he is a collaborator in its successor project, Big Data Surveillance.

Funding

This research project was funded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), under their grants and contributions program.  We are grateful for the opportunity this support provided for conducting this research, and stress that the views contained in our project reporting, including on this website, are those of the researchers, and do not in any way represent the views of the OPC.