The ability to draw similarly revealing information about Canadians’ lives is just as possible, said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow specializing in privacy and surveillance issues at the Citizen Lab at Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
The debate over the secret interception of digital, transactional records from smartphones and mobile devices, including their locations, numbers called, duration and Internet sites browsed, extends beyond the claimed security intelligence needs of the CSE and the massive, bulk metadata collection practised by the NSA.
Parsons believes some Canadian telecommunications companies could use metadata to deliver advertising and sell consumer intelligence to marketers. “Canadian companies do recognize this kind of data as a place to make money,” he said. “There is clear value in it.”
Sensitive personal information revealed in smartphone metadata, study finds
Tag: Privacy
Categories
2014.3.14
At its core, respecting the user means that, when designing or deploying an information system, the individual’s privacy rights and interests are accommodated right from the outset. User-centricity means putting the interests, needs, and expectations of people first, not those of the organization or its staff. This is key to delivering the next generation of retail experience because empowering people to play active roles in the management of their personal data helps to mitigate abuses and misuses. To this end, Aislelabs provides an opt out site that allows individuals to choose not to have their retail traffic data included in any anonymous analytics.
Quotation from “Building Privacy into Mobile Location Analytics (MLS) Through Privacy by Design” (.pdf)
It’s incredible that any company – let alone a Canadian Privacy Commissioner – would claim that an opt-out mechanism for hidden and secretive tracking technologies (i.e. monitoring your mobile devices as you walk through the world so retailers can better sell you things) constitutes “putting the interests, needs, and expectations of people first, not those of the organization or its staff.” For such an assertion to be valid the ‘people’ should be given the opportunity to opt-in, not out, of a surveillance system that few will know about and fewer will understand. There are vast bodies of academic and industry literatures which show opt-out mechanisms generally do not work; they’re not effectively centralized and they add considerable levels of friction that hinder consumers’ abilities to express their actual interests. And that’s just fine for many retailers and analytics companies because they’re concerned with turning people into walking piggy banks, not with thinking of individuals as deserving any semblance of a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Via the Ottawa Citizen:
Internet companies have hung up on a call by privacy advocates to reveal the extent to which they share subscriber information with police, security services and government.
A Canadian privacy and security group isn’t impressed with the answers it got from Canadian Internet service providers about their policies on
Privacy advocates say they’re disappointed with vague responses from Canadian telecommunication companies about when and how they hand customer information to police and security agencies.
Internet companies have hung up on a call by privacy advocates to reveal the extent to which they share subscriber information with police, security services and government.
On January 20, 2014 the Citizen Lab along with leading Canadian academics and civil liberties groups asked Canadian telecommunications companies to reveal the extent to which they disclose information to state authorities. This post summarizes and analyzes the responses from the companies, and argues that the companies have done little to ultimately clarify their disclosure policies. We conclude by indicating the subsequent steps in this research project.
The most recent posting about our ongoing research into how, why, and how often Canadian ISPs disclose information to state agencies.
Categories
2014.2.14
Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at the Citizen Lab, told The Varsity that “Metadata at this point, is as or more invasive in its collection and analysis than the content of a communication. Any suggestion that because its metadata, it’s any less invasive, just isn’t true.”
“If you were to monitor the metadata coming out of my phone for a day, it would be a lot more revealing than any actual content. This would include things like where I was, when I made the phone calls, how long they were, who I made them to, and who those people talked to,” said Parsons. Using this information, Parsons said, intelligence agencies can determine movement patterns, browsing tendencies, shopping and lifestyle habits, all without figuring out specifically what was said in the conversation.
The Citizen Lab’s campaign for government surveillance oversight has been at the heart of the debate on consumer telecommunications and Internet privacy. Last week, they issued an open letter to several Canadian phone and Internet service providers (ISPs). The letter asked them to publicize the extent of customer information divulged to law enforcement and other intelligence agencies. When contacted by The Varsity for further comments on the Citizen Lab’s campaign, Jennifer Kett, Senior Manager at Rogers Media Relations said they were currently reviewing the request. She added: “We take the privacy and security of our customers’ personal information very seriously. We require a properly executed warrant to disclose customer information to law enforcement or any other body. If we believe that a request is overreaching we will take steps to challenge it.” Kett declined to provide further details when asked, saying that the review of the Citizen Lab’s request was pending. Bell Canada did not respond to multiple contact attempts.
Amitpal Singh, “U of T academics at forefront of online privacy battle”
Christopher Parsons, Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, reacts to the assessment that it is okay Wi-Fi data was collected at airports.
My appearance on CTV yesterday, talking about the CSEC Commissioner’s statement that it’s perfectly legal for the foreign signals intelligence agency to collect Canadians’ metadata.
Categories
2014.2.13
Dr. Christopher Parsons, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affair, University of Toronto, Canada: “Our democratic governments have been caught massively spying on innocent individuals around the world. In the process, citizens’ willingness to exercise rights of speech, association, and collective action have been chilled. By reforming governments’ behaviours in a concerted, global, fashion we can push back against this surveillance, surveillance that currently threatens to suffocate our democracies.”
Katitza Rodriguez, “International Community Unites to Protest Big Brother”
Excited Pixels 