Good data vs accountability: Don’t make us choose

Asking for transparency and consent from StatCan is not an attack on the institution, it's an effort to protect personal data. 

How much information should the government have on us? What information does the government need to make good policy? Should we have a say on what information of ours is shared with government? How do we ensure our data is used properly?

These are just the start of a long list of questions that have come up since Global News broke the story that StatCan will be collecting the banking and credit information of hundreds of thousands of people in Canada without their consent.1

This is part of a wider program StatCan is running to improve the data the government uses to draft policy and make budgets. StatCan claims household survey responses are low, making it hard to get reliable data the government can use to make policy and investment decisions.

This is why StatCan is looking at other available data sets in the private sector, including banking and credit information, to broaden their information sets. According to StatCan, personal identifiers, like your social insurance number or home address, are stripped off the data to protect personal information. StatCan only needs agregate data to perform their job, not personal information.

However, the personal banking information StatCan is seeking is passed from banks to the agency without being anonymized in advance.2 And what's more, Peter Hope-Tindall, a privacy expert, filed an Access to Information and Privacy request and found that StatCan continued to hold much of his personal information completely non-anonymized.3

In an era when we are seeing daily hacks, data breaches, and misuse of information by corporations and governments, including our neighbours to the South, this centralization of some of our most sensitive information without protections, is very concerning.

By failing to strip personally identifiable information from the data before it’s transferred to StatsCan, and then failing to anonymize this data in a timely manner, StatCan and the banking institutions are increasing the likelihood our information will end up in the hands of hackers, or be leaked. What’s more, it gives governments information that could be used against individuals or groups in the future.

This is a critical point we need to make: Government needs good, reliable data to make informed policy. But access to this wealth of sensitive data comes with the responsibility to ensure these data-collecting practices do not put people’s personal information at risk. In other words, StatCan does not need identifiable personal information to measure the rate of inflation, unemployment or debt. And they shouldn’t need to know if that information belongs to me, or you, or your friends, to be able to provide those measurements and assessments.

This scandal has, in many ways, been intensified by the previous government’s lengthy attempts to minimize the power and data collection of StatCan. One of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s most controversial policies was to kill off the mandatory long-form census, and make changes to the information StatCan gathers in its shorter census survey. This was viewed as a war on data, and fuels much of the debate still today.

Whether Prime Minister Harper believed it was good public policy at the time, or the action had more nefarious motives, the fact is that these actions helped politicize StatCan – an institution that most people in Canada hadn’t previously thought twice about.

As a result, criticism of StatCan is now seen as an attack on the institution and on evidence-based policy – instead of a concern about data management practices, and the privacy protections needed for our most sensitive personal data – two issues that are critical to distinctly separate from one another.

In response to StatCan's most recent data collection attempts, OpenMedia launched a campaign asking for greater privacy protections for people in Canada – not as an attack on the institution, but rather in an effort to protect the personal data of people across the country.

We believe that the government of Canada, in this case via StatCan, needs good data sources to make policy decisions about the future of our country. But we also believe that everyone deserves control over their data, and StatCan’s collection practices must be transparent, and seek consent to collect private information.

If you believe that government has a right to data to draft policy based on evidence, but that government should also respect the privacy and personal information of people, then join our campaign calling the federal government to update Canada’s out-of-date privacy laws and give modern-day protections to our most sensitive data.