Cleaning up Britain's privacy laws

By Leah McLaren - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 5 Comments

Yui Mok/PA Photos/Keystone Press

No one can whip up a scandal quite like the British press. In a country in which the kiss ’n’ tell splash is both a lucrative and time-honoured tradition, many publications here view it as their right—in some cases raison d’être—to be able to publish the raunchiest details of a celebrity’s sexual indiscretions with impunity.

But the British courts don’t always agree. For several years now, British judges have been granting anonymizing court orders, commonly known as “super-injunctions,” which prevent U.K. media outlets (usually tabloid newspapers) from publishing stories that may be damaging to the parties involved. In some cases, the orders prevent the claimants themselves from being named, and in the most “super” of super-injunctions (a slang—not legal—term), the injunction itself is also banned from public mention. The injunctions cost between $30,000 and $80,000 on average to take out, prompting widespread criticism that they are an option open to only the already rich and famous.

If there is only one thing the British press like less than being scooped, it’s being muzzled. While super-injunctions have long been an irritant to the scandal sheets, they have only lately boiled over into front-page news, after the Wikipedia entries of four protected public figures were rewritten with lurid details inserted. In response, a number of others jumped at the opportunity to speak out against these gag orders, which some see as both hopeless in the digital era, as well as a dangerous infringement on freedom of the press.

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I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, Apple tracks me

By Jesse Brown - Friday, April 22, 2011 at 9:18 AM - 13 Comments

If he had nothing to hide, he'd have nothing to worry about.

Okay, so Apple has been tracking your whereabouts through your iPhone or iPad without your consent for the past 10 months. So what?

No, really – so what? You don’t need to worry about Apple knowing where you’ve been. As they’ve explained (.pdf), they’re tracking you for your own good! By triangulating your whereabouts through cell phone towers,  Apple can vastly narrow down the range of your possible GPS coordinates, making your GPS-reliant apps run much quicker.  Feel better yet?

Maybe not. Okay, but consider this- even though your device secretly rats out your location to Apple every 12 hours, this data cannot be linked to you.  Apple assigns you a randomly generated number that changes every 24 hours. It’s this number that’s linked to your location history, not your name.  So even if law enforcement presented Apple with warrants, demanding the complete history of your whereabouts (as they routinely and successfully do with mobile carriers), Apple would be technically unable to drop a dime on you, even if they wanted to.

This guy stops at every Arby's.

So don’t worry about the fact that Apple has your location data. Instead, worry about the fact that you do.

Your iPhone or iPad automatically generates an unencrypted file called “consolidated.db” which contains the last 10 months of your location data with time stamps. Any computer synched to your Apple device also has this file.  Anyone who gets their hands on your gear can easily tap into the file and get an exact log of your movements. There’s already a handy app to turn this raw data into a pretty map.

U.S. Senator Al Franken has sent Apple a stern letter (.pdf) demanding answers on this flabbergasting revelation, and you can expect every privacy commissioner in the land to soon do the same.  In the meantime, here’s how the nervous among you can delete your consolidated.db files – so long as your iPhone is jailbroken.

Don't touch my junk

By Erica Alini - Monday, November 29, 2010 at 1:40 PM - 9 Comments

Some experts believe that tough new airport screening methods are inefficient at identifying ever-changing terrorist threats | Photography Andrew Tolson; Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

As stepped-up U.S. airport security has American Thanksgiving travellers boiling over pat-downs and naked-body scanners, Canada is getting ready to open up some more private records for Uncle Sam to look at. Starting next year, U.S. authorities will be able to collect personal information, which may include passport details and flight itineraries, for the roughly five million Canadians who cross U.S. airspace every year travelling to destinations such as Mexico, Latin America and the Caribbean, even if they never touch U.S. soil.

On both sides of the border a new round of government peeking in the name of security is refocusing minds on an old question: do we really need to do this? Increasingly, people north and south of the border are saying no. But the backlash is also raising debate about how we can best protect our borders while also minimizing the impact on privacy rights. Neither Canada nor the U.S.—whose systems are increasingly more closely intertwined—seem close to striking the right balance, experts argue.

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Saying 'nein' to street view

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

CARSTEN REHDER/DPA/ZUMA/KEYSTONE PRESS

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Google in Europe. Governments and residents are not thrilled with the company’s Street View service, which allows users to get an up-close-and-personal 360-degree image of any given location, including residential areas. In Guernsey, two of Google’s Street View cars were vandalized. Meanwhile, the Czech Republic shot down Google’s second request to collect data from Czech streets, saying the collection represents a threat to citizens’ privacy. One of the concerns revolves around the cameras, which are posted 2.7 m on top of Google’s cars. The Czech office says the cameras are too tall and allow intrusive photographs to be “taken over the fence.”

There’s similar resistance in Germany. Even though Germans are among the most frequent users of Street View, they reportedly aren’t so comfortable over the possibility of seeing their own houses online. Over 100,000 have already registered to have their homes blurred out on Street View, slated for a full launch in Germany’s 20 biggest cities by the end of the year. Others have until Oct. 15 to apply for their houses to be pixelated unrecognizable.

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Her future’s so bright
Carrying not one but two glasses of bubbly, Beth Ditto trotted the catwalk for Jean Paul Gauthier at Paris Fashion Week. Ahead of the show, the U.K.’s size-28 singer discussed her weight with a British TV host: “One of the most tiring parts of being fat and being proud of it is you do a lot of proving yourself.”

Or an old-fashioned prorogue
Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Fortier has a novel idea to eliminate the constant threat of a referendum in Quebec: make the province hold one every 15 years, with no option to hold another in the intervening years. “As a federalist, I’d prefer that we didn’t hold them anymore,” he said. “But I’m a realist.” Unfortunately for Fortier, novel ideas aren’t necessarily good ones. Federalist politicians across the country were quick to pan the proposal. “I’m sure there are better things to schedule every 15 years,” said PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas, “like a high school reunion.”

Because the camera doesn’t lie
He’s as sharp on TV as he was on the stump, but Eliot Spitzer is still fighting the creep factor in his new role as co-host of the new CNN talk show, Parker Spitzer. “Crossfire meets Moonlighting” is how the New York Times television writer Alessandra Stanley described the show, noting an ill-advised air of flirtatiousness between the former New York governor and fellow host Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with conservative leanings. Seated cheek to cheek behind a round table strewn with newspapers, the pair traded smiles and interrupted each other like second-marriage newlyweds, as they chewed over political news of the day with guests. Clearly, we’re supposed to forget the call-girl scandal that chased Spitzer from office. But his tight smile and darting eyes make it hard to suspend disbelief.

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Toward a total ban on analogy in political rhetoric (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 30, 2010 at 1:33 PM - 0 Comments

The policy director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association explains why aggregating government data to replace the census would be unfortunate for the basic principle of individual privacy.

The government has said that in addition to the new voluntary National Household Survey, it will rely on existing databases to paint a picture of the Canadian population, but Vonn said that approach is far more worrying than the long-form census.

Citizens’ privacy relies on data in government and private databases existing in silos, she said, but linking them will “create de-facto citizen dossiers that are a privacy Chornobyl waiting to happen.”

On the one hand, the measure outlined here could conceivably lead to a disastrous breakdown—a meltdown, if you will—of citizen privacy whereby a large amount of information is inadvertently released or abused.

On the other hand, in the case of the actual Chernobyl, several dozen people were killed and several thousand were poisoned, while a large area in Ukraine was rendered uninhabitable.

How will they know how many boaters to harass?

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, July 8, 2010 at 4:06 PM - 0 Comments

In the name of reducing government intrusion in people’s lives, the Conservative government is proposing to abolish the mandatory long-form census (it would become voluntary), a vitally important source of data that only applies to one-fifth of the population, once every five years.

At the very same time, the same Conservative government is proposing to tighten the requirement that every one of Canada’s 7-million or so boaters obtain an operator’s licence and carry it with them every time they get in a boat, on pain of a $250 fine — an utterly needless piece of bureaucratic busywork whose sole defence is that it is ludicrously unenforceable.

Sigh. Could we make up our minds, please? Doctrinaire libertarianism, nanny-state paternalism, whatever. But both at once is just too much to bear.

The law is an ass, but must it bray so loudly?

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 at 6:01 PM - 17 Comments

Behold the compound stupidity that emerges from ill-made privacy law. There was a terrible murder near the entrance of Edmonton’s Hotel Macdonald early Monday; the Edmonton Journal conducted a careful, sensitive investigation into the background of the victim, who had committed a murder himself in 2001. Because the Journal disclosed that the dead man had once been in foster care and that he had been a young offender, the broadsheet couldn’t report his name for fear of inviting reprisals from multiple levels of government. Meanwhile, every other news organ in town was left free to identify him precisely because they didn’t have, or didn’t tell, the full story. The law, in its infinite wisdom, endowed this lucky brute with privacy rights that did not expire with this death. But for whatever it might be worth, those rights did absolutely nothing to shield his identity from anybody.

It would be lovely if governments decided that concealing information about suspicious deaths, or indeed any deaths at all, is horrible public policy. Privacy provisions in Alberta’s child-welfare laws are particularly awful in this respect; they have repeatedly impeded newsgathering on the quality of foster care in this province—an exercise of the free press that could not possibly be more urgent. I would add that various police forces are rapidly embracing the repugnant habit of concealing the identities of corpses discovered in public places “at the request of their families”. This does not appear to be a matter of law at all; it is just improvised self-regulation. The reporter, presented with a blank wall of sentiment, never has any ready means of confirming that a family has made such a request, or, indeed, been consulted or located at all. If we are prepared to accept this obfuscation as a matter of routine, we might just as well give the cops an explicit license to cover up homicide, or, indeed, to commit it.

[UPDATE, 6:46 pm: the Edmonton Sun has withdrawn the name of the victim from its story, which is linked to above. Here's how it reads now; here's a screenshot from 6 am Eastern time today, courtesy of the Google cache. Note here that general knowledge of the name of the victim might actually, I dunno, help the police solve the crime.]

I don’t see any 'vicious' betrayal

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments

Last week my editor mused that, in light of the recent death of J.D. Salinger, I might want to write about the “vicious” betrayal of Salinger’s privacy by Joyce Maynard. Maynard was Salinger’s live-in girlfriend for some months in 1972-73 when she was 18 years old and he was 53 (commonly known as an “abusive” relationship unless you are really important like Pierre Trudeau or Salinger, in which case the young woman is the exploiter). That’s how I came to dip into what George Steiner referred to as “the Salinger Industry,” which, incidentally, doesn’t need any stimulus money to keep going, even though he published only one novel and some short stories and then went dead quiet for the last 45 years of his life.

I stuck to a few primary sources: Salinger’s own work, his daughter’s autobiography Dream Catcher, and Maynard’s memoir At Home in the World, which she published in 1998. That’s the book that caused all hell to break loose, because in it she forfeited silence to write about her time with this pathologically private man.

I can’t imagine why anyone was upset with Maynard. I found her account of weirdo life in Cornish, N.H., with Salinger, veggies, and the great search for her simillimum to repair her vaginismus (look them up; I had to) absolutely riveting.

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Another country

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 6:17 PM - 231 Comments

Ever since Danny Williams was revealed to have been seeking treatment for a heart ailment across the border, the media have been observing a strange and uncomfortable silence about the matter.

On one hand, this reticence is commendable. Williams’s preference in health care is nobody’s business, and should remain, as far as possible, a private matter between him and his God. Though some claim this is a lifestyle choice, it’s far more likely that it is a result of something beyond his control. As such, it is not a fit matter for public commentary.

But once the story has, by one means or another, entered the public domain, that puts a different colour on it. At that point, the media are not just declining to report on something: they are actively colluding in a fiction. The issue is no longer Williams’s medical inclination. It’s the media’s refusal to acknowledge reality.

It’s not as if this were twenty or thirty years ago, when the mere knowledge that someone had a preference for American health care might have been enough to end his political career, or to bring social censure and humiliation upon him. In this more enlightened age, most people are more likely to react with a yawn. It is no longer unusual to see people who openly “go south,” from captains of industry to sports stars. Many Canadians have discovered they know someone like that — perhaps even a member of their own family. All that we are accomplishing by suppressing discussion of Williams’s case is to suggest that there is something embarrassing or shameful about it. Far from erasing a stigma, we are reinforcing it.

I’m not suggesting we should go around unmasking politicians who use American health care, but who prefer not to discuss it. But this taboo on reporting things that are already public knowledge is contrary to our natural urges as a profession, and as such strikes me as unhealthy.

SIGH: For readers who are puzzled by the first paragraph, Rob Silver’s comment below is well worth reading.

Your family is being watched 24-7

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 131 Comments

To passing tourists, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the U.S.S.R. CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he said there was “a CCTV camera for every 14 citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel The Defector, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background:

“ ‘So how are the British so certain about what happened?’

“ ‘Their little electronic helpers were watching.’ Continue…

Watching them watching you: Liveblogging Google at the ATI, Ethics and Privacy Committee

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 17, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 10 Comments

It’s going to be tough, but  ITQ will do her best to restrain her giddy fangirlishness when representatives from Google — well, Google Canada, but still –  take the witness stand during this afternoon’s hearing on privacy implications of camera surveillance. Also appearing: Canpages, Inc, which relies on traffic cams to provide directions and traffic reports.

3:21:09 PM
Good afternoon, Googlephiles/phobes! We’re running a bit late this afternoon – well, the MPs are, at least, due to a trio of votes that will probably take at least a half hour to get through; ITQ was, of course, here at the crack of 3:15pm. It turns out I’m not the only one drawn like a bug to a zapper to this particular hearing — there are at least three TV crews here, and the one witness – Olivier Vincent from CanPages – already present is willingly submitting to the scrum — he already has not one but two flatscreens hooked up to his laptops and was doing his best to explain how his company is *not* being investigated by the Privacy Commissioner — the two are simply “in discussions” over the company’s use of realtime street-level shots.

3:33:22 PM
The Googlers are here! The Googlers are here! They look so — normal. How disappointing. Only one of the three is actually slated to testify, according to the notice — Jonathan Lister. He, oddly, doesn’t seem to have a laptop, although he is armed with a bright red binder.

3:39:29 PM
Man, I’d forgotten how long it’s been since I’ve covered Ethics — I nearly didn’t recognize Pierre Poilievre when he scampered over to present himself — or allow himself to be presented to — the witnesses.
The vote is over, apparently, so the MPs should start trickling in soon; the NDP’s Bill Siksay is already here, as is the Bloc’s Richard Nadeau.

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Biz Fix

By Jason Kirby - Friday, July 4, 2008 at 12:51 PM - 0 Comments

In the money: Who wins when President Bush doles out $168 billion to stimulate the American economy? Pornographers, it turns out. AIMRCo, a market research company focused on the adult online industry, says many porn websites have aroused interest from new customers since the checks first went out in mid-May. Some sites have experienced a 20-30 per cent growth in membership rates. A spokeswoman for one site said they polled new customers and found one-third were using Bush bucks to buy smut. “Getting more people to buy porn was probably the last thing Bush had on his mind when he came up with his ‘stimulus package,’ but we’ll take it.”

Trading down: Bad news for Sw33t_Tush, a.k.a. Lloyd, the 48-year-old mechanic from rural Kansas. A U.S. District judge has ordered YouTube to hand over reams of data about the viewing habits of millions of users. Viacom sued to get access to the records to prove that viewers seek out its programming (ie. the Colbert Report) far more than user generated content. While that would be interesting to know as a cultural factoid, given all the hype about social networking and viral media, the judge’s decision means Lloyd’s online proclivities will wind up in a court docket on some lawyers desk.

Number cruncher: As gasoline prices march higher, many pundits have suggested the situation will correct itself when consumers cut back on consumption. I guess we’ll soon see. Today StatsCan said sales of motor gasoline fell 3 per cent in May. Oops, since then the average price for gas in Canada has risen from $1.28 per litre to $1.39. I’m sure it’s just a lag effect.

Ticker tape: Words that would never, ever, ever have appeared in the same headline before now: General Motors, mini car, U.S…. The BCE deal is done, though investors still aren’t fully convinced…