Tag: Privacy

Draft Paper: Do Transparency Reports Matter for Public Policy?

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date January 6, 2015

Telecommunications companies across Canada have begun to release transparency reports to explain what data the companies collect, what data they retain and for how long, and to whom that data is, or has been, disclosed to. This article evaluates the extent to which Canadian telecommunications companies’ transparency reports respond to a set of public policy goals, namely: of contextualizing information about government surveillance actions, of legitimizing the corporate disclosure of data about government-mandated surveillance actions, and of deflecting or responding to telecommunications subscribers’ concerns about how their data is shared between companies and the government. In effect, have the reports been effective in achieving the aforementioned goals or have they just having the effect of generating press attention?

After discussing the importance of transparency reports generally, and the specificities of the Canadian reports released in 2014, I argue that companies must standardize their reports across the industry and must also publish their lawful intercept handbooks for the reports to be more effective. Ultimately, citizens will only understand the full significance of the data published in telecommunications companies’ transparency when the current data contained in transparency reports is be contextualized by the amount of data that each type of request can provide to government agencies and the corporate policies dictating the terms under which such requests are made and complied with.

Download Telecommunications Transparency in Canada 1.4 (Public Draft) (Alternate SSRN link)

Tags Canada, Privacy, Surveillance, Transparency

Quotations

2015.1.6

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date January 6, 2015

We understand that cellphone searches are sometimes necessary to obtain important evidence. But the same is true of searching your home. The most invasive searches tend to be the most useful, precisely because of their invasiveness. The U.S. Supreme Court recently recognized this in a unanimous decision requiring a warrant for cellphone searches. As a society, we’ve decided that police need a warrant to search your home, barring exceptional circumstances. But the underlying assumption – that our homes, not our phones, contain our most private information – is increasingly untrue. Should police search our homes, we would not be alone among our generation were our first thought: “Oh god – is my phone there?”
Anisah Hassan and Josh Stark, “Phones are more private than houses – so shouldn’t be easier to search”

Tags Canada, Law, Privacy

Quotations

2015.1.2

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date January 2, 2015

Our relationship with Facebook, Google and Amazon isn’t symmetrical. We have no power to define the relationship and have zero say in how things work. If this is how commercial companies treat humanity, what can we expect from governments that are increasingly normative in what they expect from their citizens? Our governments have been taken hostage by the same logic of productivity that commercial companies use. With the inescapable number of cameras and other sensors in the public space they will soon have the means to enforce absolute compliance. I am therefore not a strong believer in the ‘sousveillance’ and ‘coveillance’ discourse. I think we need to solve this problem in another way.
Hans de Zwart, “Ai Weiwei Is Living In Our Future: Living under permanent surveillance and what that means for our freedom”

Tags Privacy, Quotation, Surveillance, Technology

Links

Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (video)

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date December 27, 2014

This links to the full video interview I gave to Postmedia about privacy issues in 2014. On the whole I’m actually pretty optimistic about things: we know more than in the past about the extents to which governments engage in surveillance. The organizations and individuals who subsequently act on this knowledge are more capable, today, than they were even two years ago. And the political class is increasingly aware that privacy and transparency issues are becoming more and more important to their constituents.

Now, does this optimism mean that things will necessarily improve dramatically in 2015? Of course not. But momentum continues to build and more and more individuals and organizations are taking privacy issues seriously. And that’s cause for some celebration as far as I’m concerned.

Tags Canada, Law, Media, Politics, Privacy

Links

Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (Transcript Summary)

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date December 27, 2014

Privacy issues could not be ignored in 2014 (Transcript Summary):

Telecom and online security expert Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and director of the Telecom Transparency Project, reviews how Canadians’ shifted in 2014 and what to expect in the new year.

Tags Canada, Law, Media, Politics, Privacy

Links Writing

Hacking Our Humanity: Sony, Security and the End of Privacy

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date December 24, 2014

Hacking Our Humanity: Sony, Security and the End of Privacy :

The lesson here isn’t that Hollywood executives, producers, agents and stars must watch themselves. It isn’t to beware of totalitarian states. It’s to beware, period. If it isn’t a foreign nemesis monitoring and meddling with you, then it’s potentially a merchant examining your buying patterns, an employer trawling for signs of disloyalty or indolence, an acquaintance turned enemy, a random hacker with an amorphous grudge — or of course the federal government.

And while this spooky realization prompts better behavior in certain circumstances that call for it and is only a minor inconvenience in other instances, make no mistake: It’s a major loss. Those moments and nooks in life that permit you to be your messiest, stupidest, most heedless self? They’re quickly disappearing if not already gone.

Though I find various aspects of Bruni’s article insulting (e.g. “…the flesh that Jennifer Lawrence flashed to more people than she ever intended…”) the discussion of who are the most common threat actors that people have to worry about is a fair point. It’s also important to discuss, and discuss regularly, that the ‘defences’ which are commonly preached to protect our privacy are fraught with risk. While being silent, not associating with one another, or not reading certain things online might keep one ‘safe’, engaging in such censorious activities runs counter to the freedoms that we ought to cherish.

Such responses ignore the costs — often paid in blood or years of people’s lives— that have gone into fighting for the freedoms that we now enjoy and that are engrained in our constitutions, our laws, and our social norms. They forget the men and women who fight and die on battlefields to protect the freedoms of citizens of other nations. And, perhaps most significantly, such responses demonstrate how larger social movements directed at enshrining our freedoms through collective action are set aside, often cynically, so that we can try and resolve the problems we all face as individuals instead of as collective political actors. Self-censorship isn’t just a means of ensuring self-protection; it’s an exhibition of citizens’ unwillingness to at try and utilize our political processes to resolve common social ills.

Tags Censorship, Democracy, Liberalism, Privacy

Links

Canada asks app stores to mandate privacy policies

Post author By Christopher Parsons
Post date December 17, 2014

Canada asks app stores to mandate privacy policies:

“Developers are asking for information they have no real business accessing,” said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. “If a flashlight app is asking to read your SMS messages, that’s a step too far.”

According to Parsons, many app developers participate in a “grey market” of personal information.

“The value is not in selling apps,” he said. “The value is in collecting information about individuals and then turning around and selling it to third parties.”

Requiring developers to include privacy plans alongside their apps “is a step in the right direction,” Parsons said, but many policies are written in “boilerplate legalese,” meaning even if they’re available, many consumers won’t be able to interpret them.

“What commissioners could do is say that if you’re going to develop a privacy policy… you should be providing a simple, accessible version of what you’re doing,” he said.

However, making privacy policies mandatory could allow agencies like the privacy commissioner’s office to better target companies who violate their own terms of service.

“What it means is that when and if a company says something in its privacy policy that’s not true, there’s an actionable legal case against them,” Parsons said.