IP videoconferencing: Issues of privacy awareness, challenges, and compliance

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Sherman, C. Mooney

• Videoconferencing over Internet Protocol (IP) is a real-time, collaborative, virtual communication tool. However, current videoconferencing technology has not been built with the protection of the participants' privacy in mind. It is concerned only with the privacy of the conference session, using available techniques such as encryption. The popular use of videoconferencing has led to several compliance issues related to privacy and to the protection of the
  participants' personally identifiable information (PII).
  The purpose of this paper is to identify the privacy risks associated with PII and to raise awareness of the challenges and shortcomings of privacy laws related to both recorded (stored) and unrecorded videoconferencing sessions. It
  does not address technical challenges incurred during the deployment of the infrastructure or threats to personally identifiable data/information vulnerabilities.
  The research is based on the author's experience with videoconferencing while working with Alberta Learning and Alberta Education, as well as on an extensive literature review of secondary sources. This combination of sources
  reveals the current privacy risks to participants' PII and the challenges to organizations to mitigate these risks. By analyzing the technical, legal, and policy issues involved with videoconferencing, it also identifies the challenges of
  compliance with the Privacy Act in order to ensure that the protection of participants' PII is consistent with the law.

• Date created

  2009-01-08

• Subjects / Keywords

  • videoconferencing
  • privacy protection
  • personally identifiable information
  • Freedom of Information Protection of Privacy Act
  • Alberta

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-ervw-k959

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International