GATINEAU – Canada’s Privacy Commissioner is praising new transparency reporting guidelines that should help Canadians understand how often, and in what circumstances, businesses provide their personal customer information to law enforcement and security agencies.
The new federal transparency reporting guidelines, released Tuesday by Industry Canada, were developed in consultation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC), government departments and industry stakeholders. They are designed to provide direction to companies on making public information related to requests from government agencies to access customer information.
“The new transparency guidelines will help to close existing gaps in transparency reporting," said Commissioner Therrien, in a statement. "Public discussion about privacy issues needs to be grounded in facts. Timely, statistical information will help Canadians to make informed consumer choices and also better understand how and when government agencies are accessing personal information held by private sector organizations."
The OPC also released a comparative analysis of transparency reports that have been voluntarily published by various telecommunications and other service providers over the last couple of years, including Allstream, Rogers, Telus, TekSavvy, SaskTel and Wind Mobile.
The OPC added that it has also asked federal government departments to begin issuing their own transparency reports about requests to private sector organizations for customer information.
