The long-awaited Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission report on carding has been delayed until late March for “several reasons,” Scot Wortley, the project’s sole researcher, told The Coast in an email. The biggest holdups, writes Wortley, are “the vast amount of data that has been collected” and the amount of time it takes to analyze […]
Data
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How “snooping” harms us all
By now, you’ve probably heard about the Sobeys pharmacy manager who found herself in hot water after using a provincial drug database to “snoop” on the medical information of friends, relatives and even her child’s girlfriend. This is just the latest embarrassing privacy failure for the Nova Scotia government, following on from two personal data […]
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Sobeys pharmacist spied on, shared private medical records
A Sobeys pharmacist “snooped” on the confidential medical history of friends, family and coworkers over a two year period and the province failed to adequately look into the serious privacy breach. Those shocking details are contained in two new investigations released Wednesday by Nova Scotia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner. According to Catherine Tully’s office, from […]
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Police say data collection on drink tampering not required
As calls intensify for improved law enforcement response to the growing concern surrounding drink tampering, Halifax Regional Police remains firm in its decision not to formally collect data on suspected incidents. The Coast reported on a number of cases in which women believed they were drugged in north-end bars last spring. All told similar stories: […]
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Province was warned about sloppy database security over a year ago
The government’s cozy and “highly-dependent” relationship with systems service provider Unisys opened up some big holes in Nova Scotia’s IT security. So says a damning auditor general report from 2016 conducted on the same database system used for Nova Scotia’s recently breached Freedom of Information web portal. The purpose of the audit was to investigate […]
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Halifax police prep for cyber attacks
The Halifax Regional Police department is on the hunt for a new chief information security officer to develop and then manage its IT security, strategy and operations. Until the newly-created CISO position is filled, HRP’s systems are presumably more vulnerable to outside cyber attacks. Just how vulnerable, though, the department isn’t saying. “The field of […]
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The worst bus in Halifax
Halifax Transit’s buses continue to arrive on-schedule far below industry standards, with the flagship Route 1 being late over half the time during rush hour. A performance report headed to HRM council next week says the overall percentage of Halifax Transit’s fleet that arrived on time in the second quarter of 2017/18 was a humbling […]
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Toronto criminology professor hired to study Halifax police street checks
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission has hired one of the country’s leading experts on racial bias in policing for an independent review of police street checks. University of Toronto criminology professor Scot Wortley appeared before Halifax Regional Police brass and the city’s Board of Police Commissioners on Monday to answer questions about his upcoming […]
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What does a police research coordinator do?
[Image-1] Halifax Regional Police recently welcomed Dr. Chris Giacomantonio as its new research coordinator. It’s a civilian position in the department that’s responsible for pushing HRP along into a more evidence-based (and hopefully, more efficient) approach to policing. Giacomantonio is from Nova Scotia originally, but received his PhD in criminology from the University of Oxford, […]
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14 of the best datasets inside Nova Scotia’s new open data portal
[Image-1] The province of Nova Scotia has launched its new open data portal, publishing a catalogue of more than 130 datasets now neatly collected and available to download. “Open data is one part of our vision for an open and accountable government,” said premier Stephen McNeil in a release. “By making our data widely […]