By Gillian Shaw |<\/p>\n
VANCOUVER – The international drug trade is now less lucrative than identify theft, yet cybercrime is much lower on the law-enforcement agenda and Canada lags well behind in dealing with it, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, said in Vancouver on Monday.<\/p>\n
“This is a shocking phenomenon to think that the international drug trade is now less lucrative than the trade in personal information,” Stoddart said in a speech at a privacy and identity theft conference hosted by the BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association.<\/p>\n
Despite being a $105-billion global business, Stoddart said cybercrime doesn’t get nearly the same attention from police and law-enforcement agencies as does the drug trade.<\/p>\n
The privacy commissioner listed a number of areas where Canada is lagging behind the United States and other countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.<\/p>\n
“We have a system that, while perhaps not broken, is very definitely in need of repair,” said Stoddart.<\/p>\n
Pointing to an Ipsos Reid study conducted for Canwest\/Global that found 44 per cent of Canadians say financial institutions and businesses aren’t doing enough to protect personal information – and almost one third say the risk of ID theft has prompted them to change their spending habits – Stoddart said Canada still lacks a comprehensive strategy to battle ID theft.<\/p>\n
Canada has failed to take the same actions other countries have, such as implementing anti-spam legislation or requiring companies to report breaches of personal information to the privacy commissioner and to victims.<\/p>\n
There is also no restitution for victims of identify theft, even if the breach is a result of inadequate safeguards on the part of a business or organization holding that information.<\/p>\n
By Gillian Shaw | VANCOUVER – The international drug trade is now less lucrative than identify theft, yet cybercrime is much lower on the law-enforcement agenda and Canada lags well behind in dealing with it, Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, said in Vancouver on Monday. “This is a shocking phenomenon to think that the international […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1614],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-surveillance-big-brother"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}