Anil Gayakwad
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
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Canada’s Liberal government has passed a bill that will allow the government and banks to monitor consumer Internet activity so that they don’t identify particular individuals. “Consumers have an expectation of privacy in their online activity, even when they are not actually using the websites that they frequent,” explains the bill, the Digital Privacy Act, which was the brainchild of the Conservative government. Yet when they use those services, it’s now up to them to protect themselves. “This bill would allow ISPs to look into consumer online activity — even when it’s not actually happening — and would give them the ability to access and analyse customer data in order to identify individuals in order to further the government’s anti-terror and anti-money laundering goals.”
The problem is, the very same security concerns are the very reason why our Internet traffic is now being monitored instead of being transparent about its origins.
“Once you’ve opened up an Internet connection or used a virtual private network, it’s really simple to link the IP address that’s associated with the service provider’s infrastructure to you,” said Michael Geist, the director of Canadian Internet Policy and Public Policy at University of Ottawa and an outspoken critic of the anti-piracy bill, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, which the Conservative government passed. “If ISPs are able to see that data for their own purposes they can target any user, and could potentially go after anyone in the country.”
That, says Geist, would be a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights. He adds that the bill doesn’t go far enough in terms of protecting privacy. “If you have a subscriber who’s providing their service to a third party, and your ISP is acting to track their Internet traffic and then giving that traffic to the government you’re giving your ISP even greater powers to enforce its own policies on how exactly a subscriber can interact with that service.”
With that said, even though Geist believes the bill is overbroad and should be scrapped, he believes that it’s not going to pass into law this year. This is due to the fact that government House of Commons committees will have to sit through hearings in late December and early January where the privacy concerns won’t be