TORONTO – Rogers received 86,328 requests for customer data from federal agencies in 2015, down 27,327 from the 113,655 requests received in 2014, the company disclosed Thursday in its third Transparency Report.
Rogers said that the fluctuation is mostly due to "external factors", such as the number of investigations that need to be conducted by law enforcement agencies. The company said that it received requests from federal agencies like the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada Border Services Agency, and Canada Revenue Agency, as well as provincial and municipal agencies like police forces and coroners.
For the first time, it shared the number of times that it disclosed information (83,871), versus how often it rejected or was unable to provide information (2,457).
“We take active steps to safeguard our customers’ information and defend their privacy rights”, reads the report’s introduction, signed by chief privacy officer David Watt. “As we mentioned in last year’s report, we now require a Court Order/Warrant (or equivalent) to process customer name and address checks and child sexual exploitation assistance requests, unless there is an immediate risk as outlined in the Criminal Code. As a result, both of those categories are at zero for 2015, and those types of requests are now reflected under other categories.”
According to the report, Rogers received 74,977 requests for court order/warrant (rejected 599, disclosed 74,378); 2,284 for government requirement letter (rejected 0, disclosed 2,284); 9,021 emergency requests from law enforcement agencies (rejected 1,858, disclosed 7,163); and 46 foreign requests (rejected 0, disclosed 46). It also received 56,989 emergency responder requests.
The company also added two new request types to the report related to voluntary disclosure of information as suggested by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada’s transparency reporting guidelines. The request types are ‘voluntary disclosures at the request of a government organization’ and ‘voluntary disclosures on the initiative of the organization’. Both categories were at zero in 2015.
Rogers said that it generally measures the number of requests based on the number of impacted customers, meaning one court order requesting information on ten customers would be counted as ten requests. The exception to this is non-customer specific “Tower Dump” requests (within the Court Order/Warrant category), where it logs requests based on the number of times its engineering teams need to pull data from a cell tower.
“If we consider an order to be too broad, we push back and, if necessary, go to court to contest the request”, continues the report. “We successfully contested a request in court that would have involved over 30,000 Rogers customers, and we worked to narrow other cell tower searches to reduce the number of customers whose information is disclosed. The courts have confirmed our right to fight on behalf of our customers.”
