Intellectual Property Law

It's taken two and a half years to get a ruling but the privacy commissioner in Alberta, Canada, has ordered a Calgary nightclub to stop scanning the driver's licenses of people who patronize the bar and to destroy all information that the club has collected on patrons through scanning.

In August 2005, a bar patron named Nyall Engfield filed a complaint with the privacy commissioner against the Tantra Nightclub in Calgary, after employees at the club scanned his ID. The club owners claimed that the scanning discouraged potential troublemakers from entering the bar or acting out once inside, since they knew they could be easily identified.

But Engfield objected to the bar collecting his personal information without his permission.

I wrote about this issue of U.S. bars scanning IDs in 2004. Bars claim they're scanning IDs to catch underage drinkers, but many of them also use information gleaned from the IDs for their own marketing purposes. Privacy advocates have also raised concerns about bars selling the data to other marketers or rogue employees selling it to identity thieves.

The system the Tantra Nightclub used reportedly shared information it collected from patrons with other clubs.

Engfield told CBC news that, "In this day of free-flowing information, I think it's important that (consumers are) able to control the amount of information that businesses have about us."

Frank Work, Alberta's information and privacy commissioner, sided with Engfield, noting that the bar had not provided any proof that scanning IDs had resulted in a reduction of violence among patrons. The bar owner is appealing the decision.

Photo: CBC

See also:

• Great Taste, Less Privacy
• Swipe (web site with information for decoding the barcode on your ID and calculating the worth of the personal information that businesses collect from you)