Protecting Privacy.

This article discusses the new privacy protection legislation in Canada that went into effect on January 1, 2004. CONSIDER THE CASE of the bride-to-be who was inadvertently shown her fiancé's private financial papers. It revealed a line of credit she hadn't been aware of, used by her love to help pay his university tuition fees. Since 2001, federally regulated companies--banks and broadcasters, for instance--have had to comply with Canada's updated privacy legislation.Bank of Montreal had a similar near-miss last September: computers containing records that included customers' names, addresses, phone numbers and bank-account and credit-card balances were for sale on eBay for six hours before their content was discovered. The new law, called the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, or PIPEDA, says organizations can only collect personal information for a stated reason--and can use it only for that purpose.