The Special Committee to Review the Personal Information Protection Act announced it will be seeking public consultation on the provincial legislation that governs "how private sector organizations can collect, use and disclose personal information."
The committee, made up of eight MLAs, including Donna Barnett from Cariboo-Chilcotin and committee chair Mike Bernier of Peace River South, will accept written submissions on the act from now until Sept. 19. There are public hearings scheduled for Sept. 8 and 9 but no times and locations were included in the news release.
Technology has made it harder for individuals to protect their privacy and easier for companies to collect data on their customers but technology isn't the only thing to blame. Individuals willingly surrender information about themselves to companies all the time.
In the retail sector, think about how often clerks ask for the postal code of shoppers. There was a time when the response would have been "unless you're sending me a gift certificate for $100, my postal code is none of your damn business."
Not anymore.
Other stores simply have reward or membership cards, which provides far more information than a postal code. To get a card, individuals leave their names, their addresses and their phone numbers at the very least. With each swipe of the card for every visit to the store, the company can connect purchases to individuals.
The company then owns that data and can draw up illuminating profiles, based on the results, but don't worry. Companies actually don't care about individuals. Rather, they analyze all of the data together, and the more the better, to tease out consumer trends, based on gender, age, geography and so on. Retailers used to have to guess what their customers wanted to see on the shelves but not any more.
Combine that with the trail individuals leave online that can be tracked through IP addresses, Facebook profiles, Google searches and shopping habits. The reason the experts call it meta-data is because there is so much of it and it reveals so much about both individuals, about groups both broad and intensely specific (the spending habits of 25-year-old males at 10 p.m. on Friday nights in June) and about society as a whole.
It's good that there is a government committee looking into data mining by the private sector and the risk it poses to personal privacy. It's sad but no surprise, however, that the committee isn't looking at the public sector groups that use this data.
Law enforcement agencies love all of that data collected by private companies to target individuals and groups. The Harper Conservatives would like the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to be able to seize that data whenever they wanted and without a warrant. Anyone who disagrees with the Conservatives on this issue is branded as someone who stands on the side of child pornographers and terrorists.
In the United States, companies small and large are being compelled to turn over all their data. A Frontline documentary on PBS showed how federal agencies are seizing data with threatening letters to the owners of private companies. The recipients are told that the letter and the request themselves are classified, so the recipients aren't even allowed to talk to their lawyer about whether the request is even legal.
It's not just police agencies, however, who want to use the reams of personal data to their own ends without public accountability. Political parties, both in Canada and the United States, have built sophisticated voter databases populated with consumer information bought from private companies. They have done so without any accountability under statutes such as the Personal Information Protection Act since political parties are not considered private sector organizations.
As Susan Delacourt explains in her book Shopping For Votes, the federal Conservatives and NDP in particular have used the information to target specific ridings and then specific groups within those ridings, all to great effect. When politicians know what people want to hear, it lets them tailor their campaigns accordingly.
So having politicians, regardless of their political stripe, conduct a review of the legislation that protects personal information is the equivalent of having the fox assess the quality of the fencing surrounding the chicken coop.
