{"id":45579,"date":"2018-11-04T05:00:27","date_gmt":"2018-11-04T10:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=45579"},"modified":"2021-08-27T13:53:00","modified_gmt":"2021-08-27T17:53:00","slug":"statistics-canada-wants-to-become-stasi-tistics-canada-by-grabbing-personal-financial-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/11\/04\/statistics-canada-wants-to-become-stasi-tistics-canada-by-grabbing-personal-financial-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Statistics Canada wants to become “Stasi”-tistics Canada by grabbing personal financial data"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Stasi” was the abbreviation for the German Democratic Republic’s State Security Service, East Germany’s successor to the Gestapo. Not only did they perform similar functions to the Gestapo, they were even more involved in spying on Germans than their Nazi predecessors had been. Wikipedia<\/a> says that “the Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans; by comparison, the Gestapo deployed one secret policeman per 2,000 people. As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo.” Statistics Canada doesn’t want to get the full story on us by physically spying — that’s the RCMP’s job — but they do want to grab huge amounts of our personal financial data to “ensur[e that] government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians”. Terence Corcoran<\/a> explains why this might not be such a good idea:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When news broke earlier this year that the accounts of maybe 600,000 Canadian Facebook users had been compromised, Ottawa swung into action to shut down this alarming example of creeping surveillance capitalism. Scott Brison, then acting minister of democratic institutions, said his government had dispatched Canada\u2019s national spy agency to make sure the privacy of Canadians had not been compromised. \u201cSocial media platforms have a responsibility to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens,\u201d said Brison.<\/p>\n

But when news broke last week that Statistics Canada wants to expand its inventory of data on Canadians by collecting real hard-core personal information on the banking activities of 500,000 Canadians annually, the Trudeau government was suddenly not at all concerned about privacy breaches or even the principle of privacy protection. Instead of waving a red flag over the prospect that StatCan would end up with computers full of private financial details on millions of citizens, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brushed off privacy concerns, which he implied take a back seat to the government\u2019s need for \u201chigh quality and timely data.\u201d Such data, he said, are \u201ccritical to ensuring government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spoken like a true central planner and enthusiastic purveyor of policy-based evidence making. Nobody seems to know why StatCan wants to begin collecting personal banking information on individual Canadians, information that Canada\u2019s bankers are rightly reluctant to provide. In the all-new era of fintech and blockchain, the great concern among regulators is how data privacy will be protected. At StatCan, the concern is: \u201cHow do we get our hands on the data?\u201d<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

StatCan\u2019s assurances on privacy protection are not all that reassuring. In a document dated October 2018 \u2014 obtained by David Akin at Global News\u2014 the chief statistician describes his agency\u2019s \u201cGeneric Privacy Impact Assessment related to the acquisition of financial transactions information.\u201d It is clear that the names of millions of Canadians, their bank account numbers and transactions, their bill payments and personal activities, will be collected and stored in government computers. StatCan is not merely getting useful generic data on the spending and banking habits of Canadians, it is collecting the actual spending and banking habits and names of individual Canadians.<\/p>\n

It is one thing to collect and analyze statistics based on anonymous data. It is quite another to \u201crequire\u201d \u2014 Arora\u2019s word \u2014 that the banks provide \u201cindividual payments and income history.\u201d Even though billions of bits of private, individual and personal information will be collected, StatCan says that, \u201cUnder no circumstances will the personal information obtained from financial institutions be used to perform credit, expenditure or income checks on individual Canadians.\u201d He said none of the resulting statistical reports will include any personal data.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not good enough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Stasi” was the abbreviation for the German Democratic Republic’s State Security Service, East Germany’s successor to the Gestapo. Not only did they perform similar functions to the Gestapo, they were even more involved in spying on Germans than their Nazi predecessors had been. Wikipedia says that “the Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,84,10],"tags":[436,1437,154,290],"class_list":["post-45579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-government","category-liberty","tag-banking","tag-eastgermany","tag-privacy","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bR9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45579"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45581,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45579\/revisions\/45581"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}