Analysis of the Use of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies to Achieve PIPEDA Compliance in a B2C e-Business Model

The advanced computing power and reduced acquisition cost of information technology have facilitated the collection, storage, and processing of information in a short amount of time. Privacy legislation has been enacted to ensure that governments and businesses secure such collections in their systems and implement solutions to comply with the law. One such legislation in Canada is the personal information protection and electronic documents act (PIPEDA), intended as a technology- neutral data protection law, where the principles are general and do not require organizations to use a specific vendor or technological tool. In this paper, we give a detailed analysis and taxonomy of use of several privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) to assist business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations to comply with PIPEDA. Our analysis indicates that a combination of PETs can assist in complying with the ten PIPEDA privacy principles, with selection of the PETs to be determined by the organization's privacy handling practices.