The world is still reeling after National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents to The Guardian newspaper.
Those documents detailed the level of surveillance the NSA is engaging in on the Internet. Programs such as PRISM surprised many in their scope and depth of collection of meta data from average citizens using common Web services. The impact on the implications around such government surveillance programs on personal privacy has been much discussed in the media, but are there any tangible impacts on the business world? Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, says there are.
Speaking at Technicity, co-hosted by IT World Canada and the City of Toronto, Geist discussed how businesses are now more carefully considering where their data is going and what level of encryption is good enough to be considered secure. There’s an effective chill effect around data residing in the U.S. that was similarly experienced after the Patriot Act was implemented about a decade ago.
