“It’s in parties’ self-interest to not be covered by these particular rules and regulations [privacy laws]. They want to be able to collect information and not have to worry about abiding by rules and standards … there’s no reason whatsoever that political parties shouldn’t play by the same rules as businesses and government institutions,” said Jonathon Penney, an associate law professor at Dalhousie University with a focus on intellectual property and information security issues, in an interview last week with The Hill Times.
“There’s a real incentive I think for parties to collect more information, because the richer the information, the better your analytics will be, the more you can micro-target, the more you can segment your voter base and shape an individual message to target specific voters for specific reasons, and your electoral strategies and your voter messaging is going to be that much better the richer and deeper and more detailed your information is about the electorate,” he said.
On Feb. 4, the Conservative government introduced Bill C-23, dubbed the Fair Elections Act, a 121-page package of sweeping electoral reform measures, and the largest electoral reform package introduced by this government to date. But there are no privacy provisions to address the fact that political parties aren’t covered by Canadian privacy laws, something successive federal privacy commissioners have for years called on successive federal governments to do.
More and more, information is a crucial commodity in politics, as political campaigns are increasingly hinged on an ability to understand and micro-target voters to both fundraise and win votes.
In recent years, political parties of all stripes have focused efforts on developing database systems to better collect and store information on electors. The Liberal Party, for example, is reported to have spent millions on acquiring database and voter outreach technology used by the Democrats on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and much has been written about the sophistication of the Conservatives’ Constituent Information Management System (CIMS).
Provincially, some legislation does exist, including in British Columbia where provincial parties are covered by the Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). But federally, there’s nothing to govern how parties collect, use, or distribute information, as the Privacy Act only covers government institutions, and the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) only refers to organizations collecting information for commercial purposes. Federal parties are only regulated by privacy provisions in the Canada Elections Act, and those only cover information provided to political parties by Elections Canada through voter lists, which only contain names and addresses of registered voters, and nothing else.
“Practices that have been going on in the United States for a while have migrated up to Canada, so increasingly micro-targeting of voters, increasing collection about voter behaviours, associations, affiliations. In the United States, it’s known as ‘voter intelligence,’ it’s built up as a whole industry and a lot of those practices have slowly migrated and have made their way into Canadian politics,” said Mr. Penney.
Parties are investing in and building technological capacities to better collect and retain information about voters, including voting tendencies, said Mr. Penney.
“This is an area that we really need to act, we need some, at the very least, basic privacy and data protection measures for Canadians in this process. Political parties are increasing their surveillance, are increasing their data collection and it’s only going to get worse,” he said.
Kris Klein, a privacy lawyer and part-time professor of law at the University of Ottawa, said personal information is an “extremely valuable” commodity today, and everyone, from corporations like Google and Facebook to political parties, have “gotten into the habit of collecting more and more personal information.”
Mr. Klein said the fact that no federal privacy laws exist to restrict parties when it comes to personal information has been a “longstanding problem.”
“It makes for a really large black hole because there are a lot of different organizations that collect lots of personal information and, over the years, we’ve tightened up our rules to make sure that they’re all subject to at least some set of law and politicians have meanwhile given themselves sort of the back door and a free reign, and as a result there are no rules with respect to what the political parties can do,” said Mr.. Klein.
“Why create a double standard?” he asked.
Federal parties do all have their own individual privacy policies and statements, and while Mr. Klein said it’s a good first step, these policies aren’t enough.
At a recent Manning Conference session on campaign micro-targeting, software delegates were told about how they could use text keys (so having people text a key word to a number provided) as an easy way to engage voters and get contact information. Mr. Klein said this use of text keys is a “perfect example” of why mere privacy policies aren’t enough.
“One of the basic tenants of privacy law is that proper notice must be given to the individual at the time of collection,” said Mr. Klein, adding that means being clear and upfront that information is being collected, is going to be added into a database, and explaining what it will be used for.
“They may have a privacy policy that says something, but low and behold they’ve instituted a practice that falls very short of the standard that’s found in law and if the political parties were made subject to the law then that notice requirement would be a legal requirement,” he said.
Recently, following the birth of Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s (Papineau, Que.) son, Hadrien, the party invited people to send in well-wishes, names and email address attached.
There have been a number of instances where concerns were raised over use of the Conservative Party’s database.
In 2006, Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant (Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke, Ont.) sent out birthday cards to people in her riding. In 2012, Employment and Social Development Minister Jason Kenney (Calgary Southeast, Alta.) landed in hot water after media reported his office had mined information about voters from an online petition in support of a gay artist who was facing deportation. And more recently Conservative MP Eve Adams (Mississauga-Brampton South, Ont.) has also come under fire for reportedly using CIMS to contact voters outside her riding.
Parties are tight-lipped about how and what sort of information is collected, and for what purposes, but it’s clear the information held by parties goes well beyond the names and addresses provided by Elections Canada. Namely, parties have voter phone numbers and parties are increasingly using campaign software that allows for integrated data collection and voter outreach.
A program called NationBuilder, for example, helps campaigns to compile profiles of voters in a riding, and to mine data. So if a campaign got hold of someone’s email address it could be used to find social media or other internet activity linked to that email address, and then that information could be siphoned off and added to a profile, like a person’s list of Twitter followers, for example. (read: connections). The software also allows campaigns to track someone’s activity related to the campaign (whether they’re got a lawn sign, whether a tweet encouraged people to donate) and includes a live stream of social media activity, among other things.
David Fraser, a privacy lawyer and partner at McInnes Cooper Lawyers, said political parties could also use basic information like a postal code to make inferences about voters, like whether or not they live in a wealthy area. He said a “principal concern” is that people don’t even know what information parties have.
“There’s no transparency whatsoever, and no regulation and no limit of what information they’re collecting,” said Mr. Fraser.
“They could be drafting and pulling a whole bunch of public information from a whole bunch of different places that creates a much fuller picture,” he said.
Mr. Fraser said the privacy policies or statements that parties have aren’t enough and said if parties violated it, the public would never be made aware.
Mr. Penney said most Canadians would be surprised at the level of information parties are collecting about voters, and said political parties don’t like to talk about information-gathering practices likely because it wouldn’t sit well with voters.
The federal court ruling on the robocalls case found that “orchestrated” efforts to suppress votes took place during the 2011 federal election “by a person with access to the CIMS database,” and Mr. Fraser said this is a good example of why laws are needed to protect information held by parties.
“For businesses, the law is whenever you collect personal information you have to get informed consent, which means you have to identify the purposes by which you’re going to collect the information and how you’re going to use it, but political parties don’t have to do that so they can collect information covertly,” said Mr. Fraser.
Mr. Fraser said fair information practices for organizations in federal law require accountability, identifying the purpose, consent, transparency, right of access of an individual to their own information, a mechanism to deal with complaints, and a legal obligation to keep information secure.
Mr. Klein said it’s “mind-boggling” to him that Bill C-23 doesn’t include measures to bring political parties under some sort of privacy regime, and he said parties have similarly left a door open when it comes to the government’s new anti-spamming legislation that comes into force on July 1.
“When it comes to emailing people, there’s a set of really stringent standards that everybody in Canada is going to have to apply, and then glaringly there’s an exception right in there for political parties that they don’t have to comply with the anti-spam law,” said Mr.. Klein.
In fact, Mr. Penney said Bill C-23 is “exacerbating” the problem of a lack of privacy laws, as it will be giving parties even more information that can be plugged into database systems.
Under Bill C-23, Elections Canada would be required to provide parties with an officially compiled list of who has and hasn’t voted after an election. Currently, parties have scrutineers at polls (provided they have them) manually fill out what’s called bingo cards tracking who has voted on Election Day, with the idea being that it facilitates Get Out the Vote efforts. The current system is unofficial, done in the rush of Election Day and often bingo cards are lost in the shuffle after the day of, but with Bill C-23, parties will get a list compiled by Elections Canada.
Mr. Fraser said he doesn’t think it’s anyone’s business, not even political parties’, whether someone has or hasn’t voted.
Mr. Fraser said he doesn’t get a sense from any political party that it thinks bringing in privacy laws is a priority. “Why would they want to tie their own hands?”
“Very few people sign up for or seek out ways to regulate themselves even further, politicians are in the enviable position of being bale to make the rules for everybody else but exempt themselves from it, and I think that that’s what they’ve done,” said Mr. Fraser.
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com/
Author: Laura Ryckewaert
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