Rosie Lombardi

Young drivers are often clumped into one broad "under 25" category by law enforcement, insurance companies and society at large. The bad judgements and accidents of a small proportion of joy-riders and novices demonize the rest. But GPS-based tracking technologies are now being used to track individual behaviour and even to change it.

New privacy-enhancing video surveillance technology developed by the University of Toronto may bring some peace in the tug-of-war between public safety and privacy concerns in mass transit systems - but also raises a fresh set of concerns.

Organized cyber crime rings are wreaking havoc because they're vastly more organized and better funded than Canadian law enforcement, say security experts.

Privacy organizations are calling for intensified scrutiny and oversight of the RCMP's information management practices, which have failed to comply with government policy for almost 20 years.

Next-generation Canadian voting technology is making its way onto the American political stage. The secure voting technology was developed by the University of Ottawa last year and tested in graduate student elections.

Canadian politicians need a crash-course in YouTubing, say several media observers. Over half the population that looks for information about political candidates finds it primarily on the Web, according to a study by the Pew Research Centre. "People turn to the Web to find information that will impact the way they vote," says Greg Elmer, director of the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University in Toronto.

No network is an island. An outage at the Smart Systems for Health Agency's (SSHA) One network in January that left several hundred doctors in Ontario unable to access patient health records for several days has roused concerns about the risks of housing electronic health records (EHRs) in interdependent networks.

Privacy advocates on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border are sounding loud alarms about RFID-enabled enhanced drivers' licences (EDLs). In January, British Columbia became the first province to introduce EDLs for cross-border travel in conjunction with Washington State.