TORONTO: Canadian internet providers were found to be manipulating their internet users by leaking their information to US and Canadian authorities. In this way internet providers are openly violating the Canadian privacy laws.
In fact, it appears that many Canadian internet carriers are in violation of their legal responsibilities” under Canadian privacy law, says the report entitled “Keeping Internet Users in the Know or in the Dark” released today by Toronto-area researchers.
The study was conducted by information policy researchers Andrew Clement at the University of Toronto and Jonathan Obar at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, in collaboration with the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy.
It looks at the information provided publicly by internet service providers in Canada about how they protect customers’ privacy and ranked them based on 10 criteria, including whether:
They inform customers when third parties request their personal information.
They tell customers the circumstances under which they agree to those requests and provide customers’ information to third parties.
They tell customers where their personal information is stored and processed.
They try to avoid routing customers’ personal information outside Canada, where it could be intercepted by U.S. authorities, for example.
“Generally speaking, most carriers in Canada … score quite poorly in terms of privacy transparency — an average of two out of 10 stars, which is fairly low,” said Obar, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Sciences and Humanities at UOIT in an interview with CBC News.
Among the retail ISPs that most Canadians buy their internet service from directly, the top scorer was Teksavvy, with six stars, followed by Telus with five. Rogers and Bell had middling scores of 4 and 3 respectively, while Shaw and Videotron were at the bottom, with 2 stars each.
Many smaller ISPs scored even lower — Acanac received 0 stars and Storm Internet got just half a star.
“We hope that consumers will use the star table to determine which carriers are trustworthy,” Obar said.
Encourage the government to strengthen Canadian privacy laws.
ISPs’ lack of transparency about their privacy protection is a problem, Obar said, because it makes it very hard for Canadians to know who might be handing over their data to organizations such as the U.S. National Security Agency or Canadian government agencies and take steps to protect their privacy.
