Category Archives: Surveillance
(Un)Lawful Access: Vancouver Premiere & Panel Discussion
The Conservative government is trying to push through a set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to allow “authorities” to collect the private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant.
Find out more THIS THURSDAY at 6:30 PM. Continue reading
Transparent Practices Don’t Stop Prejudicial Surveillance
Drawing from lessons around privacy codes and those around Canadian ISPs’ surveillance practices, I argue that transparency constitutes a necessary but insufficient measure to mitigate prejudicial surveillance practices and technologies. We must go further and inject public values into development cycles while also intentionally hobbling surveillance technologies to rein in their most harmful potentialities. Continue reading
Respecting User Privacy in WordPress
In this post, I’m going to do a few things: first, I’m going to quickly recount why Automattic is not respecting user privacy by including Quantcast in its Stats plugin. Next, I’ll argue that reasonable users are unlikely to realize that third-party tracking is appended to the Stats plugin. Finally, I’ll discuss how you can protect your web visitors’ own privacy and security by installing a terrific plugin developed by Frank Goossens. Continue reading
The Anatomy of Lawful Access Phone Records
The aim of this post is to make clear just how much information is contained in a single lawful access “phone record”, demonstrating that the government is seeking information that grossly exceeds what is contained in the white or yellow pages today. As a result, I first provide an example phone record that resembles those in every phonebook in Canada and then offer an example of a lawful access record. Continue reading
