Notes from the IAPP Canada: The outdated fax remains a modern privacy threat
Notes from the IAPP Canada: The outdated fax remains a modern privacy threat
https://iapp.org/news/a/notes-from-the-iapp-canada-the-outdated-fax-remains-a-modern-privacy-threat
Publish Date: 2026-02-19 15:55:00
Source Domain: iapp.org
Axe the fax. Or at the very least, know where the heck it is, if you have one.
I am writing this while trying to renew a prescription, which means I am currently trapped in a familiar Canadian ritual: bouncing between a clinic, a pharmacy and an online portal that sort of works, as long as you already know which parts of it do not. There are texts, phone calls, automated messages, forms that feel half-digital and half-paper, and long pauses where no one is quite sure what is happening next.
To be fair, there has been real progress. Pharmacies and clinics have made meaningful strides in giving patients more control over their health care and better access to their own health information. But in my experience things are still far rougher than they need to be, and far more fragile than we tend to acknowledge. The unnecessary pain of navigating the system has not yet been designed out. And when systems are awkward, fragmented or unclear, privacy risk tends to creep in quietly alongside frustration.
Which brings us, once again, to the fax machine. Anyone out there remember when faxes first came on the scene, and we were getting printed messages spitting out on shiny rolls of paper, slow enough to watch paint dry?
Recent reporting out of Ontario underscores what privacy regulators have been saying consistently for years: it turns out that fax machines remain the leading cause of patient privacy breaches in the province, despite repeated calls and commitments to “axe the fax” and modernize health system communications. Sadly, misdirected faxes continue to drive a stubbornly high number of unauthorized disclosures of personal health information, even as digital alternatives are widely available and actively encouraged.
None of this is new. In fact, it is almost aggressively old. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada was investigating misdirected faxes in the banking sector two decades ago, including cases where hundreds of pages of highly sensitive personal…
