A U.S. company that lets users search for and obtain sensitive in...

and Public Interest Clinic filed a complaint in 2004 for a Canadian woman who said she paid $100 to receive her own “psychological profile” from Abika.com, owned by AccuSearch. The profile included a list of 30 character traits and “numerical ratings,” which the woman called “laughably inaccurate,” in categories such as marital fidelity and leadership. Abika said it provided services no different from Google’s by searching through information held by others. The commissioner’s office at first decided that it couldn’t require a U.S. company to provide information. But after the clinic got a Canadian court order giving the commissioner authority to investigate the “transborder flow” of information, the case was reopened. Stoddart said her office couldn’t find a factual basis for the psychological profile created by Abika and so could find no violation of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. But Abika’s other practices drew the office’s interest, and officials met with representatives of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which was investigating Abika and eventually filed a successful lawsuit against the company for selling phone records without permission. The trial-court outcome was affirmed by an appeals court in June. The FTC gave the commissioner’s office a spreadsheet listing Abika’s Canadian customers 2002 to 2006 and showing several “repeat requesters” whose files were marked “completed.” One was a business who confirmed it received information on Canadians that “proved not to be reliable.” Records from the FTC’s lawsuit, including Abika’s correspondence with database vendors, showed that some Canadians’ call histories had been turned over by Abika. Abika’s U.S. lawyers have twice requested extensions to answer Stoddart’s finding that it violated Canadian law -- first to explain how it will stop disclosing Canadians’ information, and then to find Canadian counsel. Stoddart refused the second extension.