In S.E.C. v. M.P. (Ont CA, 2023) the Court of Appeal considered a motion for a sealing order, in part grounded in advancements in technology which can use court-accessible data to generate more personal information regarding case parties:
[19] The appellants seek to introduce fresh evidence to demonstrate how private and confidential information about infant plaintiffs has been obtained and disseminated by news organizations using materials filed as part of settlement approval motions.
[20] The fresh evidence is comprised of an affidavit by one of the lawyer’s representing the appellants, together with an exhibit. The affidavit asserts that ONe-Key (a free, online government service) can be used to obtain a court file number and consequently statements of claim containing the full name of the parties despite initialization in the decision. The affidavit includes a private company’s marketing of “precedents” based on information scraped from publicly available court files. The exhibit is a story from a newspaper that included details of a settlement of personal injury litigation involving an infant plaintiff and links to the underlying litigation record through CanLII.
The author has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this Isthatlegal.ca webpage.
