CIPPIC speaks out on privacy issues

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) ramped up its fight for consumer privacy last week. The advocacy group first testified before a Parliamentary Committee on May 6, calling for a number of changes to the federal Privacy Act in order to better protect Canadians against state incursions on their privacy; and three days later it petitioned the Privacy Commissioner to investigate unnecessary data collection practices by Bell Sympatico. "The Privacy Act is badly out-of-date and does not adequately protect Canadians from inappropriate collection, use and disclosure of their personal information by the federal government," wrote CIPPIC in its submission to House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. "It is in need of a thorough review and overhaul." Now more than 25 years old, the federal Privacy Act was introduced before the Internet revolution enabled governments to collect, retain, access, manipulate, use and disclose personal data. CIPPIC writes that as technology has provided governments with this enhanced ability to profile and monitor citizens, it is up to legislators to ensure Canadians have the appropriate legal constraints to prevent the abuse of such technical powers. There are numerous deficiencies in the Act that have become apparent to CIPPIC in its public policy work, and they are the focus of the eight priorities to be addressed in re-writing the Privacy Act it presented to the Standing Committee: Accountability/Transparency Trans-Border Data Flows: Protect Against Foreign Government Abuses Make the Act Enforceable Limit collection of personal data to that necessary for purposes Protect unrecorded personal information Require Privacy Impact Assessments Security standards and breach notification Limit online disclosure of personal information CIPPIC advocates a full set of amendments to the Privacy Act to be presented to parliament by the end of 2008. CIPPIC joins net neutrality debate CIPPIC also last week joined Canada's growing net neutrality debate when it wrote to Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart about Bell's Internet traffic management practices. But rather than focusing on the anti-competitive nature of Bell's bandwidth throttling, CIPPIC approached the issue from a privacy perspective. "We understand that Bell is engaging in Internet ‘traffic management' practices that involve the inspection of Internet traffic headers and content, both of which contain information that can be linked to Internet subscribers, purportedly to classify traffic for purposes of network optimization," wrote CIPPIC. "Such practices - i.e., those involving the collection and use of personal information - are not necessary to ensure network integrity and quality of service. Moreover, subscribers whose traffic is being inspected have not consented to the inspection and use of their data for this purpose. Finally, Bell does not make readily available to individuals specific information about these practices." CIPPIC notes that such practices violate principles in Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), by failing to: Obtain informed consent from affected individuals to the collection and use of their personal information for the purpose of traffic management (Principle 4.3); Limit the collection of personal information to that which is necessary for its stated purposes (Principle 4.4); and Make readily available to the public specific information about its traffic management policies and practices insofar as they involve the collection and analysis of personal information (Principle 4.8). Bell, writes CIPPIC, is not the only ISP using privacy-invading ‘deep packet inspection' (DPI) technology to identify Internet traffic for traffic shaping purposes. "There is evidence that a number of other Canadian ISPs are engaging in similar practices for similar purposes. We urge you to investigate the use of DPI by other ISPs (in particular, Rogers, Shaw, Cogeco, and Eastlink), not just Bell," writes CIPPIC.

CIPPIC speaks out on privacy issues

News | 05/12/2008 12:48 pm EDT

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