Canadian Government's Big Fat Privacy Lie​

Canadian Government's Big Fat Privacy Lie

Personal information will not be made public ... unless it gets lost or stolen or hacked into or whispered about at a cocktail party.
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Uleth.ca: Canadian Internet Providers may not be protecting your privacy

"May not be". That's cute. If you strolled around starkers in public, the Law would toss a blanket around you and haul you downtown -- because only medical and government employees and Lockheed Martin are allowed to see your private parts, eh?

GlobalNews: StatCan scooped up 15 years of personal financial data from Canadian credit bureau

• Statistics Canada said the credit information it obtained is aggregated and used for statistical purposes only. It also said all personal identifiers are stripped from its database...
• And yet, when Hope-Tindall filed a request under Canada’s Privacy Act to have Statistics Canada divulge any information it had about him, Statistics Canada was able to provide him with all the personal identifiers he was told had been stripped out of its database...
• “It caught many, many Canadians by surprise,” [Conservative Leader Andrew] Scheer said while speaking at the Toronto Real Estate Board’s annual meeting. “We have a government entity that is not just going to get a snapshots of the population, but specific transactional data about where you’ve been spending your money, what you’ve been putting on your credit card. I believe that is unacceptable.”

It's unacceptable because it's happening during a Liberal administration with an election looming. Do we seriously think, that once in place, a Conservative government would prevent this sort of thing?  It may cancel or reduce the Census, but only because the info can now too easily be got elsewhere.

GlobalNews: Trudeau defends Statistics Canada move to collect banking info of 500,000 Canadians

• Statistics Canada is asking the country’s nine largest banks for the transaction data of 500,000 randomly chosen Canadians, including everything from bill payments to cash withdrawals from ATMs to credit card payments and even account balances.

When the government says "hand it over", the answer is "Oh, okay." Banks and Internet providers have clean hands because the government can be trusted, right?

Sure. They can be trusted to lose whole boxes of your private parts without anybody at all being at fault. Take the census, for example. Go ahead, take it, if you want to, but I don't want to. I'm with these guys: Count Me Out.

CBC: Statistics Canada loses, mishandles hundreds of sensitive census, employment files

• Some individuals not told of privacy breach even though it could be used for 'malicious purposes'

Not to mention the "design flaws" in the government website:

CBC: Design flaws crashed StatsCan's census website: documents

And they wonder why there's a growing contingent of refuseniks!

Globe&Mail: Census refusenik avoids fine and prison

• Sandra Finley was found guilty in a Saskatoon court last week for refusing in 2006 to complete a census form the Harper government has since made voluntary.
• She faced the prospect of a maximum fine of $500 and potentially incarceration until Thursday when Madam Justice Sheila Whelan granted her an absolute discharge.
• Ms. Finley said the judge in rendering her decision recognized the Conservative government's decision to scrap the mandatory long-form census. The Tories said the questionairre was intrusive and it was unfairly coercive to threaten people with punishment in order to extract answers.

Still, StatsCan repeats its mantra:

CTV: StatCan wants Canadians' financial data, downplays privacy concerns

• The government says the information Statistics Canada hopes to acquire will be kept anonymous and personal information will not be made public.

Not unless they mislay more boxes of files, or forget to lock file drawers. Funnest of all, hundreds of government employees will be able to find out what their social acquaintances are worth. Not to worry, though -- they're secret cleared, which could mean they're cleared to reveal secrets.

And then there's the problem of the Canadian Census having resurrected "The Jewish Question":

CJNews: Change in census question led to dramatic undercounting of Canadian Jews

I guess you'd have to ask a Jewish person if that's a good or bad thing.

Upshot: Don't believe it when any government official promises to protect your privacy. They knew it was a fiction several years ago when the Conservatives were still in power.

Image: 2014 TheTyee
​The Canadian Gov't Has Given Up on Protecting Your Privacy