I’m still concerned about Bill C-2 and the erosion of Canadian Privacy right that we have by default that could be legislated away. Some other parts of it make a lot of sense, but it needs significant revision in the fall before I can get behind it.
I’m not a fan of how “American” the whole bill feels in general. Service providers (which have been clarified by the government to mean virtually any public-facing business) can be more or less compelled or effectively encouraged to surrender our information to the government on premises much weaker than currently. The mechanism is that by volunteering the information (and barring themselves from disclosing it publicly), they are legislatively protected from lawsuits. They can not do that but lose that protection from liability and conversely, risk prosecution if they disobey certain orders in “exigent circumstances”. Most firms are not really going to care about their customers as much as their own liability risks.
The standard to obtain this info is also lowered by a lot and the “warrant” is being defined in this act more loosely.
These are all concerns to me because it is much harder to obtain our rights to digital privacy back once we lose them, and every reason in the book has been used by governments across the world to try to erode these. Yes, we should prosecute crimes and creating a “framework” to handover data does make sense to me but there needs to be a lot more transparency in the process, and I’d prefer not to embed a gag order/non-disclosure provision without clear availability of recourse. A lot of things are changing in this bill, so we need more time to look at this one (I’ll give C-5 more of a pass since it is actually part of what Carney campaigned on).
I’m still concerned about Bill C-2 and the erosion of Canadian Privacy right that we have by default that could be legislated away. Some other parts of it make a lot of sense, but it needs significant revision in the fall before I can get behind it.
I’m not a fan of how “American” the whole bill feels in general. Service providers (which have been clarified by the government to mean virtually any public-facing business) can be more or less compelled or effectively encouraged to surrender our information to the government on premises much weaker than currently. The mechanism is that by volunteering the information (and barring themselves from disclosing it publicly), they are legislatively protected from lawsuits. They can not do that but lose that protection from liability and conversely, risk prosecution if they disobey certain orders in “exigent circumstances”. Most firms are not really going to care about their customers as much as their own liability risks.
The standard to obtain this info is also lowered by a lot and the “warrant” is being defined in this act more loosely.
These are all concerns to me because it is much harder to obtain our rights to digital privacy back once we lose them, and every reason in the book has been used by governments across the world to try to erode these. Yes, we should prosecute crimes and creating a “framework” to handover data does make sense to me but there needs to be a lot more transparency in the process, and I’d prefer not to embed a gag order/non-disclosure provision without clear availability of recourse. A lot of things are changing in this bill, so we need more time to look at this one (I’ll give C-5 more of a pass since it is actually part of what Carney campaigned on).