A rapidly evolving global digital economy has facilitated the integration of new activities, like social networking, virtual gaming, and texting, into our everyday lives. It has also placed an economic premium on the gathering of personal information that has never before existed. These everyday activities are giving rise to different forms of invasion of privacy by other individuals and private business. Historically, the government has been seen as the major threat to the privacy rights of individuals; in the global digital economy, it is also important to take seriously privacy rights threats from the private sector of the economy.

This book maps the complex privacy protection landscape in Canada. Chapters address privacy rights and privacy protection, the mobilization of privacy rights in the context of social networking, the protection of children’s privacy in virtual-world games, the threats of “smart” advertising, and the very current issue of cyberbullying and privacy.

What is social networking? What are virtual-world games? What is cyberbullying? How are the legal problems that these engender for privacy rights part of our everyday life? What can we do about them? How could strengthening paths to justice help? These are the questions the book seeks to answer. These themes will be of interest to lawyers, academics, political scientists, criminologists, and those with an interest in public policy, access to justice, international relations, and the relationship of law and society.

Les Jacobs is professor of law and society and political science, and director of the Institute for Social Research at York University. He is also executive director of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, the country’s leading pan-Canadian think tank devoted to access-to-justice issues, housed at Osgoode Hall Law School. He has held a range of distinguished visiting appointments at other universities, including Harvard Law School; the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies; the Law Commission of Canada; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Toronto; Emory University; and Waseda Law School, Tokyo. His many other books include Rights and Deprivation (1993); The Democratic Politics of Vision (1997); Pursuing Equal Opportunities (2004); Balancing Competing Human Rights in a Diverse Society (2012); and Linking Global Trade and Human Rights: New Policy Space in Hard Economic Times (2014).

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Nachshon Goltz is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Law at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.

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Matthew McManus is a PhD student in the Graduate Program in Socio-Legal Studies at York University.

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