'This drives me crazy': We asked Ontario’s former privacy watchdog about police mass-texting for murder leads

[Ontario’s former Information and Privacy Commissioner says privacy and security go hand in hand. The Canadian Press]

Ontario Provincial Police are sending out thousands of texts Thursday in an effort to find leads in a homicide investigation.

The OPP say they exhausted all options and are now trying to get witnesses to come forward. They accessed cellphone records of people who passed through an Ottawa intersection — the last place the victim, Frederick Hatch, was seen alive.

“This drives me crazy,” said Anne Cavoukian, the province’s former privacy commissioner, of the tactic. “It makes me nervous because it has the potential to track and cause long-term surveillance.”

Cavoukian is a well-known expert on privacy. Appointed in 1997, she spent three terms as Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner and became head of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Toronto’s Ryerson University, her current position, in 2014.

Cavoukian spoke to Yahoo Canada News about her concerns.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What is your biggest worry about this mode of police investigation?

The problem is there are no checks and balances on this. They should say: we will send out texts and if we don’t get an answer [within X amount of time], then the information will be deleted. How long do you keep that information?

The OPP got a court order to get the phone numbers, but no names. And I don’t have an argument with that. It’s just that, what happens to those numbers?

Those individuals are being asked to call a toll-free number or to follow some link to “voluntarily” answer a few questions [and provide contact information].

Whatever happened to “voluntary”? I know the police told other reporters that if they don’t get responses from texting, they will go and ask for warrants to allow them to call these people.

The OPP have told other reporters they will not be giving up that information until they feel they need to. So where does it end?

But then there’s an argument some say it’s in the interest of the pubic to find the murderer, so why not allow this?

It’s not about privacy versus safety or police investigations. It should be about both. Privacy forms the foundation of our democracy. We should not be giving it up so easily.

I always hear: “If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear.”

Well I remind people about secret police in Nazi Germany and then the Stasi during East German times. The police had access to everything people did or said. Tell those people [who lived under extreme surveillance] if that was right and if they felt safe.

The Germans have a declaration: informational self-determination. I love it. Privacy is not about having something to hide, it’s about personal control. It’s so important as a value, [the German government] enshrined it as a right in their constitution in 1993.

So, what are the police to do?

I should say I’m not working against the police and don’t want to impede their investigations. They can do this but they need to have controls. We can’t allow this kind of [unbridled] use of personal information.

Think about it. If someone was doing something that day — say they were having an affair, which I am not condoning — and didn’t want to be found out, don’t they have a right to that?

If that cellphone number is kept, police can keep on tracking those individuals for a long period of time. This is wrong. This is misuse of personal information.

You have to have respect for privacy in order to have a working democracy.

Privacy and security go hand in hand. They are not in opposition.

Surveillance has to be countered by authorization. Just because you have new technology doesn’t mean you do away with good, old police boots-on-the ground methods