Tag: Telecommunications

U.S. tech firms routinely denying Canada’s requests for personal data:

Transparency reports from Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google suggest that the U.S. companies are being far more careful with Canadian data than even Canadian telecoms.

…

“The volume of (Canadian) requests, in the absence of the need for judicial warrants or other court oversight, illustrates the routine nature with which government and law enforcement can easily get (Canadian) telecoms to hand over personal information,” said Christopher Parsons, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

The transparency report numbers remain suspicious, and we need to investigate how accurate they actually are in recording Canadian requests for data when our requests are being served by US law enforcement agencies.

Is Canada Stalking Me? A New Software Platform Aims To Find Out:

Do you think CSEC and the Mounties are spying on you? There’s an app on its way to help you find out.

According to Parsons, creating the request platform isn’t the hard part, it’s securing the content from the prying eyes of government or hostile users.

“The hard part is, we could pound this out probably pretty quick, but we want to make sure the way we’re doing it is in the most privacy protective way possible,“ he said. “Canadians don’t want to worry the Citizen Lab or anyone who picks up this tool are in any position to use or know anything about them. We want to do this right.”

It’s important that Canadians are better able to request information about themselves from the companies they engage in commercial relations with. But, as important as facilitating that access is, it needs to be done in the most privacy-protective way possible.

Data issue took 3 years to surface:

Documents made public for the first time this week show that government agencies requested customer data 1.2 million times per year from just nine Internet and telephone companies. But those documents are from December 2011. For three years they were not made public by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

“It would have been helpful, it would have advanced the debate several years ago had it come out,” said Christopher Parsons, a PhD candidate at University of Victoria’s political science department.

On his privacy issues blog, Parsons has developed a form to allow Canadians to find out how much of their personal information is stored and shared.

Canada’s privacy laws allow for Canadians to request this information from telecoms, which must respond. The form can be found at christopher-parsons.com.

Though they got my affiliation wrong (I’m currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto) I still do wish that these numbers had emerged earlier.