This seminar focuses on the challenges of protecting information privacy against the threat of emerging technologies (such as biotechnology, internet communication technologies, information tracking technologies, biometrics, and surveillance technologies to name a few). Information has been central to the form and function of the knowledge economy and plays a vital role as between individuals and in relationship with the state, raising issues pertaining to its control, access, aggregation, storage, retrieval, use and dissemination. The new technologies operationally interrogate existing dominant conceptions of privacy and introduce fresh areas of private contestation that question the need for a coherent theoretical framework. This course will survey the mixed regulatory mechanisms available for protecting information privacy in Canadian law, ranging from constitutional to statutory and common law protections, and will examine how normative conceptual understandings (and their tradeoffs) mediate new technologies, civil liberties, democratic values, public policy, law and reform efforts.3 credits, fall termProfessor Amani
