News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Face Search Leaked 9 Million Photos
ClarityCheck sells a strange little product. If you upload a photo of someone, it tries to give you names, social profiles and other places that image of that person appears elsewhere online. Then a researcher found more than 9 million image files that were just sitting in unsecured cloud storage tied to the company.
National Post says the folders were labelled faces and profiles, and included adults, teenagers and children. The company prices the service for Canadian users, but it isn’t clear how many of the exposed photos were Canadian.
A University of Ottawa privacy law professor said Canadians can ask what the company holds on them, but finding out may mean handing the company a new photo of yourself. Perhaps a useful reminder that a face is not a password, and it doesn’t sport a reset button.
Read more: National Post
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A photo from the old country:
The Bank Vault May Require a Map
A safety-deposit box is often thought to be a great place to protect the paperwork you can’t afford to lose, but it can also hide that paperwork from the people who need it after you die. Welcome to a not-so-uncommon little Canadian banking nightmare.
Here is a useful warning on the old instinct to put passports, deeds, wills and insurance papers somewhere behind lock and key. One adviser described families waiting weeks for insurance claims because documents were inside a box and nobody knew which company held the policy. One Toronto photographer moved his will out after learning that a box can be sealed during probate.
The fact matters more than ever if your Canadian financial life is split between countries. A branch, a box number, a missing access code and an executor on another continent can turn routine matters of administration into a scavenger hunt with paperwork.
The fix is boring, and that’s why it works. Keep a full inventory of what exists, where it is, and who knows how to reach it, then make sure the inventory is in the hands of someone you trust.
Read more: MoneySense