You mean privacy legislation as a whole? Well, let me relate it PIPEDA. When you're looking at privacy in the public sector, you're looking at laws that to a large extent define the relationship between the individual and the state.
Privacy laws and access laws are actually democratic impulses. In the 1970s, people enacted them so the citizens could see what the state was doing, so they could hold the state accountable through the democratic process. Individuals would have enough autonomy that they could go about their private lives without any undue interference.
You have a funny kind of blending now. Because of the information marketplace that you're talking about, information that's captured for commercial purposes becomes available for other uses by the state. It becomes even more important in those circumstances to protect commercial privacy, because that information doesn't just stay there.
For example, I know that police officers in the northern United States have Internet-ready cellphones. When they stop you in your car because you were speeding or whatever, they can take your driver's licence and your name and pull up your commercial profile from data brokers to see what kinds of things you buy and those kinds of things.
I would make the argument that from a public policy point of view it's important to have strict controls over the uses of commercial information, precisely because as it flows into the public sector you're re-skewing the relationship between the individual and the state. One of the concerns I have is that we're now making the individual transparent to the state but using this legislation to protect governments from that accountability that was at the core of the impulse to enact access-to-information and privacy legislation.