HIIP Seminar: "What Happens When you Book an Airline Ticket? Surveillance, Globalization and the Regulation of Personal Data Flows"

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For the last thirty years, states have been attempting to regulate the collection, use, storage and dissemination of personal information. These regulations have an increasing set of extra-territorial implications. The culmination of the international data protection movement is manifested in the 1995 "Data Protection Directive" from the European Union. The impact of the European Union Directive on outside countries has certainly continued the process of policy convergence; personal data protection laws are increasingly similar in substance. However, the speaker will argue that the Directive has also led to a "trading up" of personal data protection standards rather than a "dumming down,? as seen in the official responses of Canada and the United States to the Data Protection Directive. Despite continuing differences between Canadian and US data protection policies, privacy protection has never assumed a higher importance on the national agendas of both countries.