Connectivity, consolidation, convergence creating new privacy threats

TORONTO--An era of increased connectivity, technological convergence and media consolidation represents something of a triple threat to the private information of citizens and companies, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart suggested Wednesday. “Most Canadians don’t grasp the scope or the magnitude of the risk to their personal information,” Stoddart said at the Canadian Telecom Summit, where she appeared on a panel with industry and privacy experts. “How can they? The technologies are so complex and they’re changing all the time. The platforms converge. The corporate players merge.” Stoddart said consumers want to upload data, play games and shop on mobile devices, which puts massive amounts of personal information—prized by businesses, law enforcement agencies and fraudsters alike—into company hands. The information is valuable currency, she said, but it needs to be used more transparently so that consumers know what they’re giving up. Darrell MacMullin, PayPal Canada’s managing director, said Canadians use his company’s service once every second overall, and on mobile devices, once every minute. Connected consumers mean more devices, connected in different ways, with applications that often involve transactions. “This is going to make things really, really complicated,” he said. Responsibility for failed transactions or ones processed twice could be placed with a telco, a bank or device manufacturer, he said, leaving consumers at a loss over where to turn. MacMullin said PayPal will become more important to the connected consumer as a trusted provider. Dr. Prescott Winter, chief technology officer for ArcSight and a former National Security Agency employee, said companies need to take their responsibilities very seriously when it comes to personal information. “All enterprises today, government or private sector, contain an enormous amount of information that belongs to other people,” he said. “We are stewards for other peoples’ personal information, for their intellectual property, and in a sense for their privacy, and so it’s incumbent upon us, whether we’re technologists or service providers, to ensure that we look after this as a primary responsibility.” Winter said many companies don’t appreciate how much they figure into the strategies of other companies, and that CEOs often tell him they’re unaware of what they don’t know. “I find that particularly chilling,” he said. Stoddart said a recent survey found only four of 10 mobile users have password locks on information stored in their devices, and noted that an audit by her office, released last year, discovered “very disturbing risks” among public servants carrying around classified information digitally. Winter said there’s an underground economy hungry for intellectual property and consumer data. Most attacks take weeks or months to roll out, so service providers and companies must be capable of monitoring what’s in their networks, using censors to find any paths and accounts being manipulated, he said. Andrea Rosen, the CRTC’s chief telecommunications enforcement officer, said Canada has earned a dubious reputation as a safe haven for spam—a means of delivering spyware and malware that can steal data and defraud individuals and corporations. Rosen said Bill C-28, enacted into law last year, would change this, granting her office new powers to ramp up investigations to target high-volume spammers. Stoddart also called lawful access legislation “a huge problem” for privacy, something Public Interest Advocacy Centre counsel John Lawford discussed on an earlier panel Wednesday. “All of you providers will be spies for the government, in the sense that you will have to set up infrastructure to record, on request, Canadians’ activities with their Internet,” Lawford said. He warned that possessing the data would make Internet service providers targets for hacking, requiring security upgrades. The newly elected majority Conservative government says bills C-50, C-51 and C-52, collectively known as lawful access, will be a top priority in Parliament and will be included in its omnibus crime legislation. Stoddart said privacy issues will only become more complex and that industry needs to take a more active role protecting consumers. “With all these new devices that people are using today, I think they ought to have at least as much privacy as they did when they shared a party line years ago in rural Canada with Ernie and Mabel on the farm down the Concession Line,” she said. mburgess@thewireport.ca

Connectivity, consolidation, convergence creating new privacy threats

News | June 2, 2011

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