Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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How Apple and Google plan to reinvent healthcare

How Apple and Google plan to reinvent healthcare:

For many years the digital health industry has been driven by wearable devices like the Fitbit, Nike’s Fuelband, and Jawbone’s Up. But if the titans of the smartphone industry succeed in creating a dominant platform for health and fitness data, this business could be in trouble. “A lot of the basic functions we have seen in fitness wearables — tracking your steps, taking your heart rate — those functions will become basic features on a smartphone or smartwatch,” says Wang.

As someone who’s worn one of these trackers for years now [1] and who is obsessive about carrying my smartphone, I cannot disagree more. My phone does rough calculation of how much I move every month and it’s routinely off by absolutely enormous magnitudes. [2] To some extent, that’s because the phone isn’t calibrated to precisely monitor how far I walk. To a greater extent, however, it’s because while I’m obsessive about keeping my phone around me it’s actually not on my person for about 30% of my movements each day. I don’t carry my phone at night when walking the dog, or necessarily when I’m wander around the building I work in.

For people who want just casual or ambient information about movement a smartphone might be fine. But anyone who is even moderately interested in tracking their activity for health reasons isn’t going to be willing to ‘guesstimate’ 1/3 of their day’s activity. The real power of smartphones is delivering information-rich notifications or aggregating data from a variety of sensors; it’s the software that they bring, first and foremost, that is their value add. And I think that for the fitness device companies to be successful they’ll need to develop powerful data mobilization schemes – you’ll need to be able to integrate data from the fitness hardware to any smartphone OS – to really capture significant portions of the market over the longer-term. I don’t buy the idea that people will keep buying sub-par products because the data is bound within a specific operating system or mobile phone ecosystem. Though, perhaps that’s just me as someone who hops between smartphone and smartphone OSes every 12–14 months.

  1. I’ve lost a pair of Fitbits, returned another, and currently use a Jawbone UP 24. I bought my first Fitbit in April 2012.  ↩
  2. As an example, My Jawbone tracked me walking somewhere between 135–150 miles last month whereas Google suggested I walked just 30–40 miles.  ↩
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Rogers sheds new light on what personal data spy agencies can get

Rogers sheds new light on what personal data spy agencies can get:

Comments yield insights into a largely hidden relationship between intelligence agencies and communications corporations Federal spy agencies are, like police, “obviously going to have to get a lot more production orders than they did in the past,” one of Canada’s Big Three communications companies says.

And while Ottawa’s agents had been getting warrantless access to some corporately held records, “we have not opened up our metadata to the government as apparently has happened in the U.S.”

Rogers Communications’ vice-president of regulatory affairs, Ken Engelhart, made these and other remarks about his company’s relationships with federal intelligence-agencies, as he spoke to The Globe’s Christine Dobby about corporate transparency in an interview this week.

Such remarks, not published until now, are important because they yield some insights into a largely hidden relationship between intelligence agencies and communications corporations.

But even as Rogers is now publicizing its bona fides as a telecom company that acts more openly than most, it is privately admitting to customers that it can face federal gag orders.

“We are unable to confirm with a customer when their information has been disclosed to a government institution… where that institution has refused to allow Rogers to disclose that information,” reads one such July 10 letter obtained by The Globe and Mail from privacy researcher Christopher Parsons, of University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

That Rogers is, in essence, playing a game of Catch-22 (if we told you we didn’t disclose your information, then others could see if they got a different response and learn we had disclosed their information, therefore we can’t tell anyone if we disclosed their information) is absurd. As is their refusal to provide basic records to their subscribers.

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Quotations

2014.7.21

The argument for human rights is based upon protection for individuals against one-sided, deceitful, inefficient, oppressive, arbitrary, cowardly, and bullying government. They are the rights that are necessary for our individual integrity, for our acceptance by the state and civil society as full members of that community, of our right to belong … We are not treated as full members when government does not provide us with information about the effect of [its] decisions, the outcomes of such decisions, or the use of resources that made the exercise of power possible.

Patrick Birkinshaw, “Freedom of Information and Openness: Fundament Human Rights?” Administrative Law Review 58(1), 2006.
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Quotations

2014.7.21

Actually taking part in deliberation on priority-setting issues might lead to increased acceptance and trust, but simply being informed that other citizens had that opportunity to do so did not seem to have any effect. Taken together, this implies that people in general might not care that much about the procedure when judging the decision in the case of priority setting in health care. The turn from a focus on principles to a focus on procedures when it comes to priority setting strategies can thus be even more problematic to implement than previous research has suggested.

Jenny de Fine Licht, “Do We Really Want to Know? The Potentially Negative Effect of Transparency in Decision Making on Perceived Legitimacy,” Scandinavian Political Studies 34(3), 2011.
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Telecoms move in right direction on privacy: Editorial

Telecoms move in right direction on privacy: 

Telus and Rogers won rare pats on the back for their decision to stop routinely handing out basic customer information to police and security agencies without seeing a warrant first.

It’s important to note that, while warrants will be required for police, they won’t necessarily be required for any agencies that already enjoy statutory authority to request information from telecommunications companies. So security agencies will continue to access data, often without warrant, despite what the Star has written.

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Rogers to require warrants for police requests

Rogers to require warrants for police requests:

In the wake of a landmark court ruling last month that upheld Canadians’ right to online privacy, telecommunications companies are tightening their policies on when they will share customer information with police and government authorities.

…

The move by one of Canada’s biggest cellphone, Internet and home-phone companies comes as the federal government works to pass legislation that academics and privacy advocates warn will erode protections around Canadians’ personal information. The Conservatives’ anti-cyberbullying bill is still before the House of Commons, but if passed in its current form, Bill C–13 would give legal immunity to telecommunications companies that voluntarily hand subscriber information to police and other public officials.

However, if telecom providers refuse to voluntarily disclose information without a warrant or court order, that could weaken the effect of the legislation, said Christopher Parsons, a research fellow with Citizen Lab, part of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.

“Rogers’s decision shows even though that liability shield is being offered, some telecoms may decline to take advantage of it,” he said Wednesday. “Rogers is not the entire industry, of course. But if we see [others] start to take a similar position, maybe that would defray the impact of C–13, although it wouldn’t mean that C–13 was a better law.”

…

The Citizen Lab’s Mr. Parsons said Rogers’s policy shift is a positive step. “This is just making it really clear to their subscribers that no matter what interpretation [of the ruling] the authorities take, Rogers’s interpretation is going to be: You need to come with a warrant.”

Rogers, TELUS, and TekSavvy have all now changed their policies: no court order, no data. It’s good to see these companies taking seriously their duties to protect subscriber data from government overreach. Now, if only they can improve on how they respond to subscribers’ requests for their personal information…

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Police Commissioner defends access to Opal card records

Police Commissioner defends access to Opal card records:

NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione has defended police being given powers to access Opal card records as a crucial tool to ensure the “safety and security of the community”.

The police chief’s defence came as a complaint was lodged with the state’s privacy commissioner about law enforcement agencies being able to track hundreds of thousands of commuters without a warrant.

Significantly, it isn’t just the police who could access Opal card data. It’s anyone defined with law enforcement powers which, in Australia, includes over 100 different groups. That this kind of data can be accessed without warrant – data that can reveal roughly where people live, work, the kinds of places they visit, people they commonly travel with – is absolutely absurd.

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Police and bylaw enforcement may be tracking your licence plate for parking data

Police and bylaw enforcement may be tracking your licence plate for parking data:

Calgary resident Linda McKay-Panos doesn’t venture downtown often, but a city database knows where and when she parked her car during 10 visits over the past four years.

Each day, parking enforcement officers drive the city’s streets in cars equipped with cameras designed to scan licence plates and identify parking scofflaws. Even if no violation has been committed, the city still holds on to data showing the time and location the vehicle was spotted, as well as a photo of the vehicle.

As use of licence-plate scanning technology grows in Canada among bylaw enforcement agencies and police departments there is no consistency as to how long such data is retained or who it’s shared with.

…

The technology is becoming a “mass surveillance” tool and demands better oversight, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab specializing in technology and privacy issues.

“It doesn’t matter that there are positive intentions behind this. It’s a surveillance system,” he said.

…

Even if police have a reason to sift through the stored data, the fact that the data consists of plate information belonging to people who are innocent of wrongdoing is troublesome, Parsons said.

“I don’t think people go around their daily lives with the expectation that my movements are going to be monitored because at some point in the future I may be of interest to the police.”

The whole article is important, and worth the read, and discloses the massive variance in how vehicular surveillance is happening across Canada.

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Emergency surveillance bill clears Commons

Emergency surveillance bill clears Commons:

Data retention and investigatory powers bill is agreed after angry exchanges alleging an abuse of parliament

This ‘emergency’ follows the European Court of of Justice finding that mass data retention laws in Europe are illegal. In response, the UK government is passing a localized data retention and surveillance bill.

Significantly, the government has stated that:

The government has insisted the ruling throws into doubt existing regulations, meaning communications companies could begin deleting vital data. Ministers claim the bill only reinforces the status quo and does not create new powers.

At issue is that the existing status quo has been deemed illegal. And yet, in response, Parliament has decided to pass more – still illegal – legislation. And so civil liberties groups will bring this into court, spend years fighting, only to have the legislation overturned. And after which, government will likely pass similar, still illegal, legislation. And the wheel of politics will turn on and on and on…

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Quotations

2014.7.15

… our own attempts to obtain policies governing assertion of state secrets privilege met with failure, inasmuch as there appear to be no policy guidelines on the use of the privilege in any major department or agency of the executive branch. Freedom of Information Act requests to some three dozen agencies and their various subcomponents yielded nothing in the way of documentation of guidance for use of the privilege. And limitations on assertion of the privilege appear to be self-imposed by the individual agencies, and use of the privilege seems to be carried out ad hoc at the discretion of department heads and their assistants. Perhaps the general feeling of administrators concerning the privilege was summed up in a Department of the Navy memorandum: it concluded that “there is nothing but good news about the state secrets privilege” as a tool to prevent disclosure of information.

William G. Weaver and Robert M. Pallitto, “State Secrets and Executive Power,” Political Science Quarterly 120 (1).