Smartphone Apps Beware – Babylon Health Investigation Provides Insight Into Compliance With Alberta Privacy Laws

This summer, Alberta's Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (“OIPC”) released an investigation report on Babylon Health, a telehealth and virtual healthcare provider operating in Alberta (“Babylon”). The report provides a number of findings and recommendations that provide insights on best approaches to drafting privacy policies and serves as a reminder to organizations to only collect the minimum information necessary to achieve their purposes.

The OIPC divided its investigation into two parts: (i) Babylon's compliance with the Health Information Act¹ (“HIA”)² with respect to individually identifiable health information, and (ii) Babylon's compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act³ (“PIPA”) ⁴, which applies to Babylon's non-medical digital healthcare tools and virtual consultations with dieticians and mental health care counsellors (the “PIPA investigation”). This bulletin will focus on the PIPA investigation, as that statute is more