Location tracking needs more oversight: PIAC

The Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) said in a new report that the CRTC and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner should do more research on the practice of tracking the location of individuals through their mobile devices. The report, released publicly Tuesday, concluded that “it is not clear if Canada’s privacy regime is sufficiently responsive to Canadians’ concerns with location-based informational privacy.” The CRTC should launch a fact-finding process into “into the collection, use, and disclosure of location information by telecommunications service providers, either directly through information gleaned directly from customers’ network usage information, or indirectly through purchasing that data from app providers,” PIAC recommended in the paper. As part of that process, the commission should ask companies whether they gather information about their customers’ location or buy such information from third parties, as well as whether they share information about the location of their subscribers with third parties, it said. The CRTC declined to comment on the report. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner should look into consumer awareness and expectations about the practice, and “produce clear guidance on the level of consent required from smartphone users before their location can be collected,” PIAC said, the same way it did for targeted advertising. The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) should also be amended to give the privacy commissioner order-making and fining power, and to include location information in the definition of “personal information” under the legislation. PIAC also said PIPEDA “should be strictly interpreted and enforced to limit the general collection of location-based information.” That means information about location should “only be collected for the purposes of providing users with services based on their location (such as mapping, recommendations, and marketing alerts), and only when consumers have explicitly consented to that collection and use, upon clear ex ante notice to consumers that their location information will be collected and used by specified entities including third parties.” Tobi Cohen, spokeswoman for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, said in an email that “we are certainly aware of this report and are reviewing it with interest. It is encouraging to see the issue of privacy being explored and discussed.” Cohen said that she couldn’t say “at this point in time whether we will be developing guidance that focuses specifically on the form of consent required with respect to location data and smartphones,” but noted the privacy commissioner’s office has “produced a number of documents related to consent, tracking and online behavioural advertising that touch on this subject.” Priorities that the office will work on over the coming years include a close examination of “PIPEDA’s current consent model,” Cohen said. She added that the privacy commissioner has, in past cases, found that location data is personal information. “With respect to amending PIPEDA to give our office order-making and fining power, this would be something for Parliament to consider,” she said. PIAC’s report said Canadians are concerned about location tracking, and that “location is an increasingly sought, increasingly tracked piece of information that can reveal much about individuals.” While in some cases, consumers are aware their location is being tracked, such as when a post to a social media app includes location data, in other cases data is gathered passively and the user isn’t aware it’s being collected by apps like the popular game Angry Birds, the report said. Location data is valuable to marketers because it gives them insight into the daily routines of and places visited by consumers, and location-based profiling has significant commercial appeal, the report said. “The opportunities for businesses to gain even more insights into consumer behaviour based on consumers’ whereabouts are said to be unprecedented,” given trends like the rapid adoption of smartphones and other devices with GPS capability, businesses’ increasing use of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology and a growing number of apps that incorporate location-based data. It’s possible to track devices in a number of ways, the report noted. That includes tracking through GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth connectivity, and through smartphone apps and wearables like fitness trackers. The report said that “retailers have begun to use location information in sensor systems known as Mobile Location Analytics (MLA),” which can track mobile devices within its range and provides data like how many repeat visitors stores have, customers’ wait times and ratios of employees to customers. PIAC referred to a Toronto company called Turnstyle Analytics Inc. that installs sensors in businesses, which provide the “capability of not only knowing which stores an individual has frequented, but also what they did or where they went on a particular day.” One of its clients was a restaurant that “used Turnstyle’s analytics to determine that 170 of its customers went clubbing a few months prior and that 250 customers went to the gym in that month. From this information, the owner ... started carrying workout tank-tops with the restaurant’s logo,” the report said. Another Toronto-based company, Via Informatics Inc., offers a service that buys location data from wireless providers, and builds profiles based on that information, PIAC said. The company also gathers data from sensors that detect WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled devices, and geo-stamped social media posts, the report added. “These customer profiles are aggregated, and along with associated analytics, sold to businesses and public entities that want to know more about the customers that are found in their physical locales,” the report said. Mobile location analytics technology is used in various sectors, such as government, hospitality, health care and transportation, PIAC said. Location-based services are also offered by Canadian telecommunications-service providers, such as Rogers Communications Inc., through services such as Rogers Alerts. The report said that the privacy commissioner’s office, in its report on BCE Inc.’s now-inactive targeted advertising program, noted that while the program wasn’t using mobile location information, the system was capable of tracking, collecting and using such data. The report cited a forecast from a U.S. research company called MarketsandMarkets that said the global location-based services market will grow from $8.12 billion US in 2014 to $38.87 billion US in 2019. The report included results from a phone survey PIAC commissioned in 2014, conducted by Environics Research Group, which PIAC said shows that “Canadians believe that location-based information is highly personal information, that requires explicit consent before it is collected and used.” It found that 77 per cent of respondents were very or somewhat uncomfortable with location-tracking, and that 30 per cent of respondents said they didn’t know whether or not their smartphones were subject to tracking, PIAC said. The survey polled 2,000 Canadians in September 2014, and has a margin of error of 2.19 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, the report said. — With reporting by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca and editing by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca

Location tracking needs more oversight: PIAC

Broadcast | September 8, 2015

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