Speaking at a Toronto-based privacy conference today and in a blog post on ITBusiness.ca, Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian calls the recent privacy breaches involving Apple and Sony “unacceptable and avoidable.”
The privacy watch dog calls the iPhone tracking debacle and the PlayStation Network mass-scale identity theft privacy disasters that didn’t need to happen. She also outlines five simple concepts that had they been applied, could have avoided any unfortunate results for these companies and their customers.
It’s not the first time Cavoukian has taken a stand against a large, American company diminishing the privacy of its users. When Facebook changed some of its privacy setting defaults to be “public”, she had this to say:
“Of course people want privacy, and they want to connect,” she says. “That’s the fallacy that so many people make, in a dated zero-sum thinking model, of course you need to have both.” Watch the rest of Cavoukian’s comments in this ITBusiness.ca video from Feb. 1, 2010.