## 4 Privacy and Open Government
### A Collapse of Public and Private  
A second privacy challenge lies in the fact that data protection has largely been structured along public and private lines [29]. Thus public and private sector actors tend to be governed by different regimes. Governments tend to be held to fairly strict standards with respect to personal information collected from individuals. By contrast, the regulation of privacy practices in the private sector may be relatively loose, with a focus on obtaining customer consent to increasingly complex and often largely unread privacy policies [48]. In Canada, private sector data protection laws set a flexible framework for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information; in the U.S., such norms tend either to be voluntary or sectoral, except in the case of the personal information of children [49]. This separation of public and private sectors may be increasingly difficult to manage. The extent of the problem is evident in recent controversies over government surveillance of citizens in both the U.S.  
and in Canada. In both countries, governments have tapped into the vast information resources of private sector companies--sometimes with the consent and cooperation of those companies [50, 51, 52]. Following public outcry over leaked information about the spying activities of the U.S. National Security Administration (NSA), the Center for Democracy and Technology in the U.S., in concert with major Internet companies, announced its support for bills that would permit corporations to publish data about requests they receive from state authorities for customer information [53]. This illustrates how the line between public and private sectors can dissolve in the context of privacy; it also suggests that transparency in relation to government activities may also require transparency on the part of private sector corporations. The blurring between public and private occurs in other contexts as well. The open engagement component of open government involves governments finding new ways to engage citizens. This may involve the use of social media tools as platforms for discussion or exchange of views. In some instances, private sector companies also provide the digital infrastructure for online feedback or complaints mechanisms, or government information is shared with the public using the services of a private sector company. In these examples, the private sector company acts as an intermediary between citizen and government--sometimes as a client of the government, but other times simply as the provider of a platform chosen by the government as a medium for interaction. In some cases, governments may choose to interact with citizens through social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus [15, 54, 55]. These companies collect, use and disclose consumer data in ways that are insulated from the stricter norms that would otherwise protect citizen data shared with government. In the case of Facebook, for example, there have been numerous high profile privacy concerns [56, 57]. The common feature in all these cases is that citizens are encouraged to communicate information to governments via a private sector intermediary. Some of this information may include personal information--either directly (e.g., a named individual providing an opinion about an issue within the community) or indirectly (e.g., the individual providing information in text or photo format (or in a combination of the two) that can lead to her identification.) It may also be the case that the service requires users to register or create an account in order to participate. In these instances, although citizens may consider themselves to be directly engaging with government, they are doing so via a private sector intermediary that may (or may not) also be collecting and recording their personal information. The standards for data protection for private sector companies are typically quite different from those applicable to government, and there may be a gap between expectations and reality [58].