It has been a busy few months on many fronts in the FIPA office. Earlier this month, FIPA’s Program Director, Joyce Yan, attended RightsCon 2018 in Toronto. This
“Smart Cities, Smart Decisions: The Personal Data of Smart City Citizens.” From left to right: Bassem Awad (Deputy Director for IP & Innovation at CIGI), Bianca Wylie (Co-Founder of Tech Reset Canada), David Goodis (Assistant Commissioner, Policy and Corporate Services, IPC), Teresa Scassa (Canada Research Chair in Information Law and Policy, University of Ottawa), and Kurtis McBride (CEO/founder of Miovision).
international conference hosts the world’s business leaders, technologists, engineers, investors, activists, human rights experts, and government representatives where they come together to build partnerships, shape global norms, showcase new technologies, and confront challenging issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. This year, there were over 2000 participants representing over 700 companies/governments/organization from 115 countries, and it featured more than 450 panels/sessions.
Opening ceremonies. From left to right: Brett Solomon (executive director of RightsCon), Melanie Joly (Heritage Minister), Ramy Raoof (Research fellow at Citizen Lab), and Kathy Brown (President and CEO of Internet Society).
The panels that Joyce attended included ones on surveillance, the federal ATI system, the right to be forgotten in Canada, smart cities, and the roll-out of the GDPR. They were all very informative and featured important conversations, many of which will be continued at this year’s Information Summit.
Not only were the panels interesting, this was a great networking opportunity where we got to connect with other civil society groups across the country. While FIPA’s mandate is primarily geared towards FOI and privacy issues in BC, we have been actively involved in federal ATI and privacy issues over the years as well. Because of this, we have an extended network of partners and collaborators across the country, and this was a great chance to touch-base and check in with many of them.
