National Post (National Edition)
Conspiracy theorists sue Google for tracking them
B.C. and Ontario class-actions each seek $10M
Among the knee-jerk results of the Facebook privacy scandal — after the stock started falling but before the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced its investigation — was a rush of lawyers filing class action lawsuits.
There are now about a dozen for Facebook users seeking payback for having their private information improperly obtained by a political consultancy hired by the Trump 2016 campaign.
A similar legal dynamic has been playing out under far less public attention in two Canadian provincial courts, as internet search giant Google defends against similarly scandalous claims of personal privacy violations, including a secret “malicious” program to track the physical locations of phones without users’ knowledge.
The plaintiffs in the massive class action claims against Google are two prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorists and a retired Toronto police detective.
Their pair of nearly identical actions, one each in British Columbia and Ontario, ask for $10 million in damages, among other penalties. They allege the tech giant has facilitated the illegal surveillance of thousands of Canadians by “hackers or undesirable state actors,” and wrongly made money by intruding on their privacy. Ultimately, the proposed class of affected people could represent nearly half of Canadian smartphone users — anyone who has used a phone that runs Google’s free operating system, Android, whether the phone is made by Google or not.
“In the case of persons for whom their location needs to be kept secret, such as victims of abuse, journalists meeting with confidential sources, or undercover police operatives, (Google has caused) an increased risk of personal harm from disclosure,” reads the statement of claim launched in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. It claims Google routinely shares information it collects about its users with “government bodies, including U.S. government intelligence agencies.”
The men behind the suits have a rich history of suspicion about American intelligence. Graeme MacQueen, a retired professor of religious studies and founding director of McMaster’s Institute of Peace Studies, is a leading 9/11 conspiracy theorist who hosted a large conference, called an “inquest,” on the 10th anniversary, dedicated to exposing the “massive deception” about America’s complicity.
“We know that the official story does not fly,” MacQueen said in a pointed double entendre, according to a National Post report. “It’s full of holes.”
MacQueen has called the United States a military “puppet master” to Israel. He claimed in 2014 that Syria had been falsely accused of using chemical weapons on civilians. And he called for an inquiry into the 2014 Parliament Hill shootings by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, saying police investigations “did not ever raise the most important questions, much less answer them.”
His fellow Ontario plaintiff, Glenn Emond, is a retired Toronto police detective who has investigated everything from suspected Satanic animal mutilation at the Toronto Zoo to Neo-Nazi sword attacks, drug rings, arsonists, a bogus dentist and a baby poisoned with Old Dutch cleaner. He is not publicly identified with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and could not be reached for comment.
The B.C. plaintiff, on the other hand, artificial intelligence software engineer Kip Warner, has even worked for Google as an external contractor. He has also worked on data from NASA’s 1975 Viking 1 Mars lander mission, reverse engineering new software to read the old data. He is friends with MacQueen, and an ally in the 9/11 Truth movement.
The lawsuit is a response to Google’s public admission of the tracking program last year, which is thought to have been discovered and leaked to the media by a competitor.
The program was an experimental addition to the Android system’s software for push notifications and messages. It allowed Google to track the physical location of any Android phone by having it send data to cell towers, even when the phone’s location-tracking services had been switched off, and even when there was no activated cellular service. In those cases, the phones would send in their data whenever they connected to the internet by Wi-Fi. By connecting to multiple cellular towers, a phone’s physical location can be triangulated.
The next legal step is likely to be a hearing on whether the lawsuits should be certified as class actions.
Google has indicated its intention to defend in B.C., but has not yet replied in Ontario. A Google spokesperson said it does not comment on lawsuits. Google has acknowledged engaging in this kind of tracking for 11 months last year, but claimed the data was “immediately discarded” and is no longer being collected.