Privacy laws for everyone
Politicians have long required private businesses and public agencies to follow privacy laws to ensure that personal information is kept secure and not improperly used.
But they’ve been reluctant, and shamefully so, to subject their own political parties to those same rules. The federal Liberals have proved that yet again by deciding to leave parties free from complying with the nation’s pesky privacy laws.
This means federal parties can continue to collect, store and use personal information about Canadians — including for political gain — without limitations or independent oversight.
The government’s decision, detailed by the Star’s Alex Boutilier, flies in the face of recommendations of the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee of the Commons, endorsed by MPs from the three major parties .
Canada is increasingly an outlier on this issue as Britain and many nations across Europe have included parties under their privacy laws. And it’s a similarly dismal situation at the provincial level, with British Columbia the only province to subject political parties to privacy legislation.
It’s not as if politicians don’t know what can be done with personal information in the absence of robust privacy regulations. They do. We all do. The Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal shows just how bad things can get. The data analytics company harvested information from millions of Facebook profiles in an alleged attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
With the rise of new technologies and social media, political campaigns are thriving on data, the more granular the better. Just as companies want to target a sales pitch to those most likely to buy, political parties want to ensure particular messages reach those who will be most receptive to them.
As digital tools get better, the ethical concerns around how data is used will only grow. That’s why the federal privacy commissioner and his provincial counterparts have all called on the government to bring political parties under privacy legislation in the election rule changes law, Bill C-76.
Right now, the law adds “nothing of substance” to privacy protections, according to Daniel Therrien, Canada’s privacy commissioner.
It does not bring political parties under the same rules as other organizations face, and it does not require them to follow established privacy rules, report data breaches or subject them to independent oversight.
While the government has not yet tabled its official response to the committee’s recommendations, a spokesperson suggested that simply requiring parties to have a privacy policy would cover the need.
“We are following the committee’s conclusions by ensuring that political parties have publicly available privacy policies,” a spokesperson for Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould told the Star.
Letting political parties come up with their own rules, post them in legalese small-print format, and police themselves when it comes to following the rules is nowhere near good enough.
Federal and provincial governments have already decided that isn’t adequate for businesses and other groups, so why would it be good enough for political parties? It bodes ill when politicians expect others to follow rules they won’t abide by themselves.
Therrien was right that it’s “clearly unacceptable” for parties to remain exempt from privacy laws. Canadians should not be left in the dark about what our political parties know about us, and how they use that information.
As digital tools get better, the ethical concerns around how data is used will grow