Edward Snowden didn’t hesitate to paint an Orwellian portrait of the future for Vancouverites inclined to be passive observers of creeping government surveillance.
It might be fitting, as he spoke for more than an hour April 5 via live stream from Russia, his head blanketing a giant screen before a sold-out crowd at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
“Rather than being partner to government, we have become subject to it,” he said as his imposing image dominated the stage, eliciting images of George Orwell’s 1984.
But the American whistleblower, who in 2013 leaked thousands of National Security Agency documents that revealed widespread government surveillance, also took aim at the private sector during a big-data webcast hosted by Simon Fraser University (SFU).
Between sharing his insights on the Panama Papers and Bill C-51 (now the Anti-terrorism Act, 2015), Snowden criticized corporate efforts to collect consumer data for targeted online advertisements.
Targeted ads rely on metadata – or, as Snowden calls it, “a perfect record of a private life” – to learn about users’ personal information, such as age, sex and buying habits, which is collected through online activity and other means.
He compared this kind of data collection to that of a private investigator who follows people around, observes their movements and reports on interactions with other people.
“These are all things that increasingly we have access to in the corporate context because there are not stringent enough regulations about how metadata should be handled,” he said.
BC Civil Liberties Association policy director Micheal Vonn, who was a panellist at the event, followed up on Snowden’s point. She told the audience that while federal regulators have gone after Facebook (Nasdaq:FB) over metadata, there’s actually no order-making power mandated to regulators.
“And moral suasion has proved to be, how shall I say, less than effective,” she said.
Fellow panellist Peter Chow-White, director of SFU’s Genomics and Networks Analysis Lab, said many Canadians behave online as if they are concerned about privacy. But in reality the “laws are not quite there” when it comes to protecting personal data shared through social media.
“Data that is kept by Canadian companies in Canada, we can do something about that [through] privacy laws. But Facebook, we can’t. Once it goes across borders, that’s out of our control, that’s out of our jurisdiction,” he said.
“We’re playing in a data landscape that’s somewhat under control – a lot of it’s not.”
Tagga CEO Jean-Guy Faubert, whose Vancouver-based tech media company collects raw data strewn across social media platforms, told Business in Vancouver advertisers are stuck between a rock and a hard place.
“On one hand, advertisers want to collect as much data as possible at the individual level, about their target market, which makes sense since the modern-day consumer is demanding a fully personal and intimate experience,” he said.
“But on the other hand, those same consumers are reluctant to willingly give up any real access to their personal data.”
Faubert said ads will likely die on the vine over the next few years if they’re not targeted.
“People want relevance, not random cluttered ads,” he said.
“And all the regulations we have in place to control access and dissemination still can’t prevent your digital DNA from being lifted from all the accesses and touch points a consumer leaves as they surf the [Internet], and advertisers are using those bread crumbs to deliver the experience that we, as consumers, are demanding.”
Snowden pointed out that advertisers did not have access to metadata when ads began rolling on TV sets. Even still, he said, those advertisements proved valuable. “We can comprehend an Internet where ads are less profitable … but still effective,” he said.
Leaks of sensitive medical records have been a sore spot for British Columbians, and Jian Pei, SFU’s research chairman in big data science, said privacy concerns also come into play in the health-care industry. Last fall, Pacific Blue Cross opened a big-data lab at SFU to advance computational health research.
Pei said when dealing with this kind of sensitive data, society has to decide on the optimal trade off between privacy and advancement.
“There are many things that need to be done technically, such as anonymization of data, but more has to be achieved through policy and better understanding of privacy and its value. The best way to address privacy concerns is to enable everyone to control [his or her] privacy, and can trade privacy for services and life quality fairly according to [his or her] will.”
Meanwhile, the provincial government is making efforts to open up data following the unveiling of its tech strategy in January.
In March, Victoria announced it would open up traffic webcam data, which includes GPS information, to developers looking to use the data to create products.
Invoke Media head of engagement Jordan Eshpeter, whose Vancouver-based digital services provider has partnered with car-sharing co-operative Modo on initiatives to connect cars online, said it would be risky for a company to use that kind of open data for a core product.
“Ultimately while it’s open, another government, for example, could close it,” he said. “If it were me, I wouldn’t base a business on necessarily open data, but in terms of a government service, governments should be building on their open data 100%.”
