A Call for Clarity: Ontario’s Disjointed Privacy Class Actions and the Need for Privacy Law Reform
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Canadian businesses face a patchwork landscape of privacy laws which provides little meaningful guidance regarding organizational responsibilities associated with the use and storage of personal information. The slow pace of courtroom-based development in the law has proved particularly insufficient to address these issues. This is evident in a consideration of privacy class actions in Ontario. Since 2012, Ontario litigants have raised the tort of intrusion upon seclusion in over a dozen class action lawsuits. While many of these have passed the certification stage, none has resulted in a decision on the merits. This paper argues that Ontario privacy class actions asserting intrusion upon seclusion are stuck in a class action purgatory, whereby class actions are repeatedly certified based on unsettled or novel legal concepts associated with intrusion upon seclusion, but these unsettled issues are never resolved at trial or otherwise. The paper explains how legal concepts such as intrusion upon seclusion can become stuck in a class action purgatory, draws a comparison between intrusion upon seclusion and the Canadian case law surrounding waiver of tort, and identifies a number of policy issues associated with the lack of development in the class action jurisprudence related to intrusion upon seclusion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".