Life in Canada

OTTAWA — The growing threat of lawsuits over data breaches may be the impetus needed for the government to do more to secure its data — and move into the cloud — as the number of legal actions arising from a breach of data could grow as lawyers and the courts test a new area of legal liability around handling and securing data, experts say.

That legal threat, including two class-action lawsuits against the department that lost the social insurance numbers for more than half a million Canadians, comes as the government investigates creating a private cloud network, which would reduce the need to physically carry sensitive data between offices and limit the opportunities for sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands.

“This may be a tipping point, but it’s not so much going to be a tipping point on legal liability,” said David Fraser, a privacy lawyer with McGinnis Cooper in Halifax.

“Maybe a court will say this is a completely new thing and we have to change things. What I think…is the publicity about this will educate people in the public service and other places that handle information that if bad things happen, it will hit the fan and people will lose their jobs.”

Last week, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada admitted that it had lost a hard drive with the personal information of about 583,000 Canada Student Loans borrowers. The unencrypted, unprotected hard drive included names, social insurance numbers, dates of birth, addresses and loan balances — more than enough information for criminals to steal someone’s identity.