A national identity card for Canadians does not fit with Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian’s vision of “practical privacy.”
Cavoukian was at U of T Monday to give a talk on the rise of surveillance in the post 9/11 age. Among the issues she addressed was the impracticality of a national ID card scheme. With an estimated price tag between $5-7 billion dollars, she doesn’t think the expense of the program would be worth it for Canadians. She also noted that collecting large amounts of demographic data and storing in databases actually encourages identity theft instead of deterring it. She cited organized crime as a group that could potentially target such a database and use it for criminal purposes. Cavoukian said that the push from the government and from Immigration Minister Denis Coderre regarding a national ID card system mostly involves appeasing an American desire for increased border security as a result of terrorism.
Dr. Cavoukian, who received both her Masters and PhD from U of T, also discussed what she considers to be privacy-threatening legislation enacted in the US and Canada after Sept. 11. She noted that pieces of legislation like the Patriot Act in the United States and Bill C-17 in Canada, Canada’s Public Safety Act, lack a legal justification for their power to “expand the scope of domestic surveillance,” and that they represent the weakening of judicial controls on the legal system. She tried to stress that security and freedom are not mutually exclusive concepts, and that part of the mandate of her office is to “change the nature of this ‘zero sum paradigm.'”
Turning theoretical, Dr. Cavoukian proclaimed privacy to be “the crux of freedom” and that, psychologically, people need to know that the government is not scrutinizing them in order to be able to form trusting relationship with others. In this respect, she considers privacy to be “at the foundation of freedom.”
A portion of Cavoukian’s lecture also addressed the use of so-called “biometrics.” Warning that biometrics are not the panacea they are appear to be, she identified two main types of biometrics that may be applied to enhance security. The first type, identification, compares a biometric, such as a fingerprint located on a security card, with a database of fingerprints, and searches for a match. If a terrorist presents his security card with a biometric attached to it, and his fingerprints are in the database of fingerprints being compared with the biometric, then the staff at the security checkpoint where the terrorist presented his card have nabbed themselves a bad guy. The second type of biometric, authentification, is simply a comparison between the biometric stored on the card, and the fingerprints, palm, or retina of the individual the card belongs to. While Cavoukian stressed that neither type of application is perfect, and that both can yield false positives and false negatives, she said that the authentification application of biometrics is much less of a privacy concern because the biometric on the card can be encrypted, and because it doesn’t require the stockpiling of data, which can again become an attraction for criminals. She also said that governments having the detailed personal information of citizens should be avoided, lest the information be used for non-security purposes.
Cavoukian ended the talk by opening up the floor to questions. Queries ranged from access to medical data for research purposes under Ontario’s proposed privacy laws, to why Ontario’s proposed privacy legislation is being delayed by the McGuinty government.
