Canada’s ISPs Are Finally Revealing How Often the Government Requests User Data

Canada’s ISPs Are Finally Revealing How Often the Government Requests User Data:

Two Canadian telecommunications companies—Rogers Communications and TekSavvy Solutions—are the country’s first to disclose the number of requests they receive from government agencies each year, and also detail what customer data they will and will not hand over upon request.

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TekSavvy’s disclosure data was published in a letter to the Munk School of Global Affairs’s Citizen Lab released late Wednesday evening, in response to questions submitted by Citizen Lab researcher Christopher Parsons and other privacy academics in late January. TekSavvy has promised that regular transparency reports are still to come.

“I’m hopeful that this will provide the clear rationale for other companies to come forward with equivalent responses,” Parsons said in an interview. “This is especially the case for companies such as TELUS, which stated in their responses they were investigating how much information they could place on the public record.”

At the time of publication, TELUS had yet to respond to a request from Motherboard for comment.

When asked if Bell would release a similar transparency report, a spokesperson would only say that the company “releases information to law enforcement agencies only when required by law and always in compliance with federal privacy and CRTC regulations.”