Bill S-210 has an arresting title compared to the majority of those passing through the various levels of government in order to become law: “Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act.”

“The title of the legislation sends a fairly powerful message. There is absolutely no doubt about that,” said Kevin Lamoureux, parliamentary secretary to the leader of the government, in the House of Commons during a reading of the bill.

Bill S-210 is a federal, private member’s bill. As of June 2024, the bill has passed second reading and is in the report stage. It is meant to protect children and teenagers from exposure to age-inappropriate content. On paper, that seems like a good idea that most people would support. Protecting children is important, and much of the discussion during the House of Commons readings focused mainly on that—not the issues with privacy the bill poses. The details surrounding how age verification would work are nebulous, and the ones that are known raise privacy concerns.

During the readings, Liberal and NDP members of parliament mentioned some of those concerns alongside the ones about children. Conservative and Bloc Québécois representatives mainly focused on controlling who is able to watch pornography.

“Canadians want their children to be protected, but they are also wary about invasions of their privacy. Canadians have very little trust in the ability of the web giants to manage their information and private data,” said Anju Dhillon, a Liberal MP who represents Dorval-Lachine-LaSalle, in November 2023 when the bill was being discussed in its second reading, a rare stage to reach for a private member’s bill. People are also fearful, she said, of deliberate violations of privacy and data security breaches.

The Privacy & Access Council of Canada has pointed out that the sweeping provisions in the bill could endanger all Canadians’ privacy, not just underaged people. Currently, age verification could entail forcing people to upload pictures of their faces and government-issued IDs to watch porn online. Some of that data could be stored long term, creating easily found trails online. The bill does not set out clear terms to prevent this from happening.

Age verification technology has been criticized as immature and not adequately developed at a technological level. A recent report from France’s National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties found that six of the leading age verification solutions did not respect users’ rights.

This is a particular stress on members of the 2SLBGTQIA+ community, who could face exposure and/or blackmail for their browsing history. Not everyone in the community is out, and the ability for others to access intimate data puts already marginalized people at further risk. For 2SLBGTQIA+ Canadians who live in rural areas, this can be especially scary as the online world is sometimes their only way to connect with queer culture.

There is not a lot of data specific to the porn-viewing habits of Canadian youth, with researchers denoting a need for more studies. A 2023 report from Common Sense Media found that around 73 percent of U.S. teens aged 13-17 had watched porn online. The same study found differences in the porn consumption of 2SLBGTQIA+ youth compared to their hetero peers—the former group was more likely to seek out porn intentionally, in an effort to explore and affirm their sexuality. Yet this bill and its sweeping provisions seems based on the idea that all youth engage in the same habits online (watching violent pornography where a woman is subjugated by a man; the concern being its influence) when that is simply not accurate.

Another critique of the bill has been that a VPN, which many youth know how to use, could be a way to get around age verification. The bill is meant to protect those under 18. They are arguably also the most internet and tech-savvy generation to exist and the bill is being created by people who have not grown up online in the same way, and may not be able to anticipate how young people will subvert provisions.

Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne is the chief architect and lead defender of the bill. A former Radio-Canada broadcaster who was appointed to the Senate in 2018, she was a guest on the “Law Bytes” podcast to debate it. In a January 2024 episode, she provided her rationale and defence against the criticism and concerns it has sparked. She explained to host Michael Geist that she has worked carefully on drafting the legislation and adding amendments for three years.

Miville-Dechêne responded to the issues Geist raised around privacy by saying that the bill had not specifically mandated exactly what age verification system would be used at this point, noting that technology evolves constantly. “No method is absolutely zero risk…we can erase the data. We can make sure that it is a mechanism that doesn’t go too far. But frankly, this is not in the bill. This is to be discussed afterwards. So how can you say the bill is dangerous?” Mivelle-Dechêne said.

“In some ways, it seems to me, that makes it even more dangerous,” Geist retorted.

A bill meant to protect vulnerable members of our society should not further marginalize others. If there are not sweeping reforms to this bill, particularly the technological aspects, it could easily become one of the biggest national threats to privacy in recent history.

You’ve got nothing to hide. You’re an upstanding, shoes-wearing citizen who smells like soap and carries good conversations. You haven’t a single thing to hide. What does it matter if Bell Canada, this past week, announced that it will track their customers’ location, media habits, search activity, website interests, and application usage? You’re a modern individual, certainly far progressed from that puritanical tradition of privacy being a matter of decorum and shame. So what if you’re a public entity, if you’re visible?

Bell, (being, it assures us, fully compliant with Canadian law), simply wants to know your search terms, your phone calls, your applications, your websites, your age, your gender, where you live and how you pay your bills. Nothing pernicious. Just everything you seem to be.

Come on, killjoy. It’s only going to be used to create a detailed, comprehensive profile for you so that it knows what to advertise to you. You know, cut through all the richness of your character, round down your idiosyncrasies a bit—really get to the bottom of this whole Coke or Pepsi question that keeps you awake some nights.

And if you’re worried that this whole cycle of gathering trends and selling trends might evolve to produce lowest common denominator identity types, don’t worry about it. You will stay inside Bell. Bell won’t give your personal information away to other companies. Besides, there are all sorts of other ways to express that adorable individuality of yours.

And if the worst happened? God forbid, if for some reason, eventually, governmental organizations decided self-preservation was a higher priority than freedoms, (far-fetched, to be sure), and if, hypothetically, they could access this information on you to find out if you might act against your better judgment and piece together some kind of dissenting opinion or, worse, some kind of public demonstration, they probably (probably!) wouldn’t use your information to ensure subservience. Probably.

It’s high time you learn to stop worrying and love the Bell.

Fine print: Or, I guess if you have to, you can opt out of it here

Four NYU students recently decided they’d had enough of heavily centralized, corporate-minded social networking sites. They took on the task of developing a social network to prove that online sharing and privacy should go hand in hand. What they came up with was Diaspora.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the team and its project:

(They) intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.

Though the creators of Diaspora have not come right out and slammed Facebook, they have credited a talk by Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University, as the inspiration behind the project. Mogden is no fan of Facebook or its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s a gem from Mogden’s talk in New York City last February:

Mr. Zuckerberg has…done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age…[H]e harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time’.

Will Diaspora dismantle what Mogden calls “a Panopticon built out of web parts”? We won’t know that for sure until the software launches next September, but a few critics aren’t totally convinced.

Regardless of the speculation around its potential to effect mainstream change, Diaspora has generated a sturdy support base in a short time. Thanks to media coverage and buzz from the blogosphere, Diaspora fundraised more than ten times its stated goal in two days. At this point, Diaspora’s Kickstarter account shows that more than 2500 backers have collectively put up over $100,000 to get the grassroots project underway. While we wait for Facebook to be crushed by a user uprising, however, uh, maybe you’d like to click the “Like” button at the top of this post?

Finalists in Virgin Mobile's National Fearless Day contest get free background and criminal record checks along with their cash prize.

Virgin Mobile wants Canadians to join the hunt for the most fearless among us. Know what we fear? Massive privacy invasion!

The contest involves posting a one minute video of yourself, doing something fearless, on YouTube. Skydiving or swimming with sharks are listed as prime examples of activities fearless Canadians partake in. On November 19th, the chosen few will participate in a contest to prove their mettle, held in Toronto. The grand prize is $5,000 and a hang-out with the company’s mountain conquering, hot-air-balloon-flying, vaguely-James-Bond-Villainish owner Sir Richard Branson.

What’s the catch you ask? According to section three of the contest rules:

Finalists authorize Virgin Mobile, upon its request, to conduct civil, criminal, financial, driver-history and other background checks as may be deemed necessary by Virgin Mobile and agree to facilitate Virgin Mobile’s ability to review a Finalist’s presence on social networking sites.

Put simply, Sir Richard and his merry band at Virgin get to do everything but root through your garbage to ensure they know more about you than you do, before they put your face next to their logo. Yes, Virgin Mobile has actually put a price on privacy, and it reads $2,000 – $5,000.

[photo credit: johnathanb1989, used under Creative Commons licence]

Frankly, there’s more than enough moral panic out there about the web and the Youth of Today already. It’s old hat. What I found more interesting about this message today is that, while it’s true that civilians post unflattering, embarrassing, or quasi-criminal photos of themselves and each other online, the worst and farthest-reaching damage is done by institutions and businesses collecting and then either abusing or misplacing personal data. It’s all right there in Stoddart’s report. Of 422 privacy complaints the office handled in 2008, the top five industry sectors represented in those complaints were: financial institutions, insurance, sales, telecommunications, and transportation. The “noteworthy cases” of 2008 identified in the report are examples such as Ticketmaster demanding that customers agree to receiving marketing materials in order to use their service; the Law School Admission Council, the body that oversees the LSAT, demanding fingerprints from everyone who writes the test; a chain of bars in Manitoba that was photocopying drivers’ licences every time they carded their patrons and keeping the information; and of course, CIBC’s classic “Oops, we lost a hard-drive containing 470,472 client records” blunder from 2006, an incident the commissioner’s office finished up in 2008, concluding: “while robust corporate privacy policies are essential, they must also be backed up by ongoing staff training.”

What these incidents show is that sure, while there’s a generational shift under way and younger Canadians are showing a more cavalier attitude towards their private information, most of the actual damage comes from institutional incompetence, the banks, insurance agents, hotel chains, websites, and other corporate entities we entrust with our privacy. Yes, you should take an interest in keeping your data safe. But stronger regulation, more rigorous corporate oversight, and bigger fines for privacy breaches is what will really make the difference.

Below I’ve embedded the privacy commissioner’s report from August.

And narcissistic it is. A recent CBC documentary addresses those of us born after 1970 (myself very much included) by the not-so-subtle moniker “Generation Me.” The children of the Baby Boomers (more passively, “The Me Generation”), we’ve grown up being told just how special we are from the moment our heads crown from the birth canal. Our notion of self is defined not only by entitlement, but by an immense sense of self-importance brought upon by years of parental conditioning. We each fancy ourselves to be not only unique and special snowflakes, but the best possible unique and special snowflakes, and, while we may not have invented the quarter-life crisis, we have certainly perfected it.

While Facebook’s demographics are rapidly bridging generational boundaries, most of its users still fall within the 18-34 year-old range—Generation Me at full throttle.  As both shameless exhibitionists and hopeless voyeurs (again, myself included), we relish in celebrity culture while simultaneously craving a slice of the fame for ourselves. Which is why, studies suggest, we are completely careless about the kind of personal information we are willing to disclose on our Facebook profiles.

courtesy of http://collegecandy.files.wordpress.com

“Youth are sharing a great deal of information on social networking sites such as Facebook and may not fully realize the consequences of this disclosure,” says Amy Muise, one of two University of Guelph Psychology PhD students recently awarded nearly $50,000 in government research funding. The research in question? Why, disclosure of personal information on Facebook, of course.

The grant, awarded by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada to Muise and fellow graduate student Emily Christofides, amounts to nearly the maximum allotted amount for the office’s Contributions Program, which is considered among the top privacy research funding programs in the world.

A June 9 University of Guelph press release quotes privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart: “I’m proud that our office is able to help encourage relevant and cutting-edge research. I am also glad that we can work with established organizations to spread knowledge about the importance of privacy.”

Whether or not this research is enough to knock some sense into our self-obsessed noggins is anyone’s guess, but this is at least a step in the  right direction toward figuring out how to create boundaries between our lives and the meta-existences we forge online.