In many sectors of the community, computers are now being employed to record information relating to millions of people on a wide variety of matters - health, employment, intelligence, aptitudes, credit, reliability emotional disposition, personal habits etc. Initially collected by governments, schools, employers, credit agencies, insurance companies, etc., much of this material is now co-ordinated and stored in the powerful memory banks of modern computers. In less than a second, these machines can make co-ordinated information available and usable. Access to the computer's memory bank can give access to substantial information on countless numbers of people. This poses the latest challenge to privacy.
Society needs to collect information in the interests of planning efficiency.
The more co-ordination that takes place and the faster that information can be retrieved, the more efficiently we can function. In the late 1970s, the Parliament of Canada took a first step in meeting this problem. It enacted legislation which gives to Canadians a measure of access to personal information about themselves which is contained in many of the data banks under federal government control. To whatever extent people dispute the information so recorded, they can require rectification or at least the recording of their objections. As might be expected, there are a number of exceptions to this right of access.