Outcry forces StatCan to put data collection project on ice
Canada’s chief statistician says a controversial “pilot project” involving the collection of customer data from banks will not go ahead until the anxieties about the effort are addressed.
Anil Arora told the Senate of Canada’s banking, trade and commerce committee on Thursday that the proposal has not yet been implemented and that no related data has been harvested by Statistics Canada.
“I can assure you that we will not proceed with this project until we have addressed the privacy concerns expressed by Canadians by working co-operatively with the privacy commissioner and with the financial institutions,” Arora said.
The flurry of concern over the StatCan proposal began when Global News reported in late October that the agency was asking several banks for information on the financial transactions of hundreds of thousands of Canadian households.
After the report was published, Arora said in a statement that the traditional ways of gathering information, “are no longer sufficient to accurately measure Canada’s economy and societal changes.”
Arora added that more than three-quarters of purchases are made online by Canadians, and that Statistics Canada “has to have access to these data” in order to provide quality statistics in certain areas, such as housing and debt.
The chief statistician continued to defend the need for quality stats on Thursday, noting there is wide use of the agency’s information. He noted that, “while the notion of 500,000 addresses may seem large,” there are more than 14 million households in Canada.
Arora stated at the end of October that they had worked with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada during the planning of the project, but that he had invited the commissioner to provide additional recommendations on the effort.