‘Privacy in the Social Networked World’

The Asian Privacy Scholars Network (APSN) 2nd International Conference

With the publication of this Special Issue of the Journal of Law, Information and Science, the APSN has taken a significant step forward in communicating research arising from its networking. Presenters at the Conference were invited to submit full papers of their talk for this Special Issue. As with the conference, there is a mix of papers on the central theme of the conference (privacy and social networking) and on some broader issues of privacy and data protection in Asia/Pacific and around the world. Greenleaf covers the global question of how many privacy/data protection laws there are, giving a definition of what it means to have such a law and coming up with the perhaps surprising calculation that over one hundred jurisdictions now have something that appears to be a broad-based regime, although with wide variation on both the regimes of enforcement and on the details of the laws. Keeping with a transnational theme but approaching the conference theme, Bennett et al cover the long-running, though now mostly resolved, dispute between Canadian privacy authorities and (primarily US-based) international social media companies as to how much Canadian privacy law applies to the operations of such entities when they are used by Canadian residents/citizens. Trottier moves further into the conference theme of social networking, remaining with a Canadian focus with a report on his work on the use of social media for social and criminal investigations into activities during riots in Vancouver in 2011.

Read more about the APSN Conference and special edition here.

Online papers