Tech giants are the real threat to Canadians’ privacy, public safety minister charges
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/tech-giants-are-the-real-threat-to-canadians-privacy-public-safety-minister-charges/article_c499cb59-cb96-4a5e-9d7a-de9c4d39b69d.html
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Can you imagine it being your job to publicly Stan for and ram through every unpopular piece of bullshit your boss decides needs to get done?
Imagine the things you’d have to stand up and say. With a straight face as if anyone thinks you’re being sincere.
All that said, fuck off Gary.
The public rhetoric framing Silicon Valley as the ultimate privacy threat is a deliberate distraction. Consumers already agree to the terms of service/privacy policy, which dictate exactly what data is collected and when it gets purged. The legal boundaries are set. When illegal activity happens, existing protocols trigger automated reporting and data preservation so law enforcement can intervene using a targeted warrant. The current system works.
The reality is the state wants to bypass that process. By publicly condemning tech companies for data harvesting, the government creates a smokescreen to justify laws that legally forbid those same platforms from deleting your data. They are attempting to override private contracts to mandate the blanket retention of every citizen’s communication logs and location history for up to a year, complete with engineered backdoors.
This is not consumer protection. It is government overreach. The state is conscripting private tech infrastructure to build a massive surveillance dragnet it has no constitutional authority to run on its own.
Maybe so, but that doesn’t give the government the right to ink bill c22 that will affect all our internet privacy rights .
The real threats to Canadians’ privacy, and every other measure of our collective well-being are the ultra-wealthy. They just happen to own tech companies. Oh, and everything else.
Non-gun owners didn’t give a shit about the OIC’s. This may gain a little more attention from your average elbows up plebe, but I doubt it….
1. Bill C-22 in its existing form has problems and needs to be fixed.
2. Tech companies operate in Canada with less privacy guard rails than Europe (where they need to obey GDPR), or even in certain US States (e.g., CA has CCPA). PIPEDA, Canada’s analogous privacy law, is weaker on multiple fronts.
Insofar as the Minister is referencing point 2, he’s absolutely right. If he’s trying to use it as an argument to ignore the problematic aspects of Bill C-22, I’d respectfully disagree.
The Minister should fix Bill C-22 (sounds like this is going to happen), but should also strengthen PIPEDA to be on par with GDPR or CCPA.
I am not sure this is a very supportive argument.
Tech giants are a threat to Canadian privacy, because they collect so much data about us. Putting through a bill that opens a backdoor to that data makes that worse.