privacy – Page 2 – Double Aspect

Pistes de réflexion

Dans mon billet de vendredi, j’ai discuté de la complexité de la pondération du droit à l’image et à la vie privée et de celui à la liberté d’expression et à l’information dans le contexte de la publication d’une photo d’une personne sans le consentement de celle-ci. Comme je l’ai expliqué, je crois que les tribunaux québécois, dont notamment la Cour supérieure dans son récent jugement dans Hammedi c. Cristea, 2014 QCCS 4564, n’accordent pas suffisamment d’importance à la liberté d’expression et au droit du public à l’information, et ont une conception trop large du droit à l’image. L’équilibre voulu par le législateur québécois, qui a, à l’article 36 du Code civil, posé l’intérêt public comme limite au droit d’une personne de ne pas voir son image publiée sans son consentement, n’est pas atteint. Dans ce billet, j’aimerais proposer quelques pistes de réflexion supplémentaires pour ce débat qui, comme je l’expliquais vendredi, a parfois manqué de nuances.

La première piste dont j’aimerais parler a été tracée par Pierre Trudel dans son sage billet sur le jugement Hammedi, oû il a soulevé l’arrêt de la Cour suprême dans Alberta (Information and Privacy Commissioner) c.Travailleurs et travailleuses unis de l’alimentation et du commerce, section locale 401, 2013 CSC 62, [2013] 3 R.C.S. 733, dont j’ai discuté ici. La Cour y a invalidé la législation albertaine de protection de la vie privée en vertu de laquelle un syndicat avait été condamné pour avoir pris et publié des photos de personnes traversant une ligne de piquetage. La Cour suprême a statué que la législation ne reflétait pas une pondération appropriée du droit à la vie privée, qu’elle protégeait de façon excessive, et du droit à la liberté d’expression, qu’elle négligeait. Le prof. Trudel voit en ce jugement la preuve de ce que, pour la Cour suprême, « la liberté d’expression protège le droit de capter et d’utiliser des images prises dans un espace public ». Il a peut-être raison ― j’aimerais, même, qu’il ait raison ― mais je n’en suis pas certain. Le jugement rédigé par les juges Cromwell et Abella insiste spécifiquement sur l’importance, pour un syndicat, « de communiquer avec le public et de le convaincre du bien‑fondé de sa cause, compromettant ainsi sa capacité de recourir à une de ses stratégies de négociation les plus efficaces au cours d’une grève légale » (par. 38). Il s’agit peut-être d’un argument plus ou moins superfétatoire employé par des juges qui sont probablement les deux membre les plus pro-syndicaux de la Cour suprême. Mais peut-être est-ce une indication que le contexte particulier de l’affaire avait une importance réelle pour la décision, et que, dans une autre situation, celle en cause dans Hammedi par exemple, la Cour suprême ne pondérerait pas la liberté d’expression et le droit à la vie privée de la même manière. Du reste, la Cour souligne que sa « conclusion ne nous oblige pas à cautionner toutes les activités du syndicat ». Elle se contente d’indiquer que les restrictions à la liberté d’expression imposées par la loi albertaine sont inacceptables, sans préciser, comme elle le fait pourtant souvent, quelle pondération des droits en cause serait constitutionnelle. Je soupçonne, en fait, qu’elle ne le sait pas elle-même. Son jugement mérite certainement d’être invoqué dans le contexte québécois, mais il ne nous fournit pas toutes les réponses, loin de là.

Un autre arrêt de la Cour suprême qui pourrait alimenter la réflexion sur la pondération du droit à l’image et de la liberté d’expression est Grant c. Torstar Corp., [2009] 3 RCS 640, 2009 CSC 61. La Cour y a statué que le droit de la diffamation, en common law, ne respectait pas suffisamment la liberté d’expression. Pour la Cour suprême, le droit à la réputation, que le droit de la diffamation protège, est lié, dans une certaine mesure à celui à la protection de la vie privée et aussi à la dignité de la personne. On peut donc soutenir que l’arrêt Grant, même s’il n’est pas directement pertinent en droit québécois, témoigne donc lui aussi d’une volonté de la Cour suprême de donner plus de poids à la liberté d’expression de sa pondération avec des droits reliés à la vie privée et à la dignité, dont le droit à l’image est un aspect, selon le Code civil. Cette volonté résulte entre autres de la conscience de la Cour de l’effet paralysant (« chilling effect ») que peuvent avoir les règles insuffisamment protectrices de la liberté d’expression sur la communication de messages qui devraient pourtant être entendus dans le cadre de la recherche de la vérité et du libre débat démocratique.

Un autre facteur dont la Cour suprême a tenu compte et qui mérite qu’on s’y attarde en réfléchissant à la meilleure interprétation de l’article 36 du Code civil est le rôle des médias. La solution adoptée dans Grant consistait en la création, en droit de la diffamation en common law, d’une défense de « communication responsable concernant les questions d’intérêt public ». S’inspirant de pratiques du « journalisme responsable », la Cour a tout de même voulu protéger tous les « propagateurs de nouvelles et d’information », y compris ceux qui utilisent « de nouveaux modes de communication (beaucoup d’entre eux en ligne) permettant de traiter de questions d’intérêt public et ne faisant pas appel à des journalistes » (par. 96). La Cour a souligné qu’une publication qui respecte les normes du journalisme pourrait ne pas résister à une analyse devant un tribunal et que, par conséquent, « exiger que la couverture des questions d’intérêt public atteigne à une certitude judiciaire peut aboutir à empêcher la communication de faits qu’une personne raisonnable tiendrait pour fiables et qui sont pertinents et importants pour le débat public » (par. 53). La situation dans Hammedi, où la Cour supérieure, sans véritablement se demander si la photo en cause était pertinente au débat public et pouvait faire avancer celui-ci, ou si sa publication était justifiée comme une pratique journalistique responsable, a imposé sa compréhension de ce qui était « nécessaire » pour publier l’article qui l’accompagnait ressemble à celle que la Cour suprême a cherché à corriger en matière de diffamation.

Une dernière piste de réflexion que je voudrais proposer, mais non la moindre, concerne l’impact des nouvelles technologies sur la mise en oeuvre du droit à l’image. Encore à l’époque où la Cour suprême a décidé, dans Aubry c. Éditions Vice‑Versa, [1998] 1 R.C.S. 591, que la publication d’une photo d’une personne sans son consentement constituait une faute, seuls des journalistes et quelques hobbyistes avaient les moyens de prendre et de publier de telles photos. Or, les choses ont bien changé. Presque tout le monde a désormais un téléphone cellulaire doté d’une caméra, et deux Québécois sur trois sont sur Facebook. Et il est rare qu’on demande le consentement préalable d’une personne avant d’en publier la photo sur Facebook (ou un autre réseau social). Dans la mesure ou cette personne accepte par la suite d’être « taguée » (désolé, j’ignore s’il y a un terme français!) dans cette photo, on peut en inférer son consentement rétrospectif, mais qu’en est-il de celle qui ne l’accepte pas ou, simplement, n’est pas sur Facebook, ou encore de celle dont on publie une photo sur une plateforme qui n’offre pas de fonctionnalité équivalente? Il me semble bien que ces personnes là pourraient poursuivre l’auteur de la photo. Est-ce un résultat souhaitable? Et même si ce l’est, force est de constater qu’il existe un écart très considérable entre la règle juridique, telle que posée dans le Code civil et dans Aubry, et la norme sociale qui a émergé en réaction au changement technologique après l’adoption de cette règle.

On le sait, la publication sur internet d’images intimes de personnes qui n’y ont jamais consenti est un problème réel et grave. Les conséquences, pour les personnes affectées, sont affreuses, voire même tragiques. Tant mieux si l’article 36 du Code civil pourrait aider les victimes à obtenir réparation des responsables. Cependant, une règle qui est appropriée dans le cas d’images qui, en raison de leur contenu, sont vouées à rester (très) privées ne l’est pas nécessairement pour celles qui sont parfaitement banales, et encore moins pour celles qui peuvent raisonnablement servir à illustrer des sujets d’intérêt public. Comme le dit le prof. Trudel, il est temps que la Cour d’appel et, éventuellement, la Cour suprême se penchent sur les nombreuses questions que le droit à l’image et sa mise oeuvre en droit québécois soulèvent en 2014. Le législateur aussi, d’ailleurs.

Une image et mille maux

Le jugement de la Cour supérieure du Québec dans Hammedi c. Cristea, 2014 QCCS 4564, condamnant un journaliste à payer 7000$ de dommages et intérêts à un couple dont il avait, sans son consentement, pris et publié la photo parce que la dame portait un niqab suscite beaucoup de controverse. Éloïse Gratton a, fort poliment, suggéré que cette décision aurait des conséquences malheureuses. Pierre Trudel, avec moins de retenue, a soutenu qu’elle « accentue encore plus le déséquilibre entre la liberté d’expression et le droit à l’image qui bénéficie, au Québec, d’une inquiétante suprématie sur la liberté d’expression ». La fédération des journalistes professionnels du Québec l’a dénoncé comme une « dangereuse […] atteinte à la liberté de presse ». Hier, le ton est encore monté, avec les billets, publiés sur le Blogue Politique de l’Actualité, de Frédéric Bastien, qui dénonçait, comme à son habitude, une nouvelle manifestation de « de l’idéologie antiraciste qui imprègne les bien-pensants » et de « l’activisme judiciaire », et de Jérôme Lussier, qui défend le jugement de la Cour supérieure comme reflétant un nécessaire respect de la vie privée de citoyens vulnérable.

Pour ma part, je partage l’avis du prof. Trudel. La décision de la Cour supérieure reflète, comme il l’explique, une conception trop large du « droit à l’image » et, surtout, une conception bien trop étroite de l’intérêt public et de la liberté d’expression. Même si les vitupérations de M. Bastien, comme toujours, sont excessives et manquent désespérément d’assise factuelle ou juridique, Me Lussier, à mon avis, néglige beaucoup de nuances importantes en y répliquant.

Les faits de l’affaire sont simples. Le défendeur, qui publie un petit journal à Québec, voit une dame portant un niqab, la demanderesse, dans un marché aux puces local. Il constate, écrira-t-il plus tard, que « [s]ur certains visages se lisait facilement la consternation ». Il prend donc quelques photos, où la dame et son mari, le demandeur, sont visibles, le visage du demandeur identifiable. Il publie une de ces photos dans son journal, dans une article qu’il intitule « Le voile intégral est de retour à Québec ». Les demandeurs en ont vent et, après avoir considéré la proposition du demandeur de publier une réplique, choisissent plutôt de le poursuivre pour atteinte à la réputation de la demanderesse (un recours que la Cour a rejeté) et violation de leur droit à l’image.

L’article 36 du Code civil du Québec dispose entre autres que « peu[t] être […] considéré[…] comme [une] atteinte[…] à la vie privée d’une personne [le fait d’] [u]tiliser son nom, son image, sa ressemblance ou sa voix à toute autre fin que l’information légitime du public ». Cette disposition met en oeuvre l’article 5 de la Charte des droits et libertés de la personne (alias la Charte québécoise), qui dispose que « [t]oute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée ». Appliquant cette dernière disposition (mais pas directement l’art. 36 du Code civil, qui n’était pas encore en vigueur au moment des faits) dans Aubry c. Éditions Vice‑Versa, [1998] 1 R.C.S. 591, la Cour suprême a statué que la publication d’une image d’une personne où celle-ci était identifiable constitue prima facie une atteinte à sa vie privée, et donc une faute. Elle ne sera cependant pas considérée comme fautive si elle répond à « [l]’intérêt du public à être informé » (par. 57), ce qui sera notamment lorsque la personne en cause est quelqu’un « dont la réussite professionnelle dépend de l’opinion publique » ou encore « un individu […] appelé à jouer un rôle de premier plan dans une affaire qui relève du domaine public, par exemple, un procès important, une activité économique majeure ayant une incidence sur l’emploi de fonds publics, ou une activité qui met en cause la sécurité publique » (par. 58) ou une personne se trouvant « accessoirement » dans un lieu ou un événement public ― mais pas si la personne est le sujet central de la photo (comme c’était d’ailleurs le cas dans Aubry, où une image de la demanderesse avait été utilisée pour illustrer un essai sur « la vie urbaine »).

Comme l’explique le prof. Trudel, c’est là « une conception extrêmement étroite de la notion d’intérêt public ». Or, comme il le souligne, dans Hammedi, la Cour supérieure la rétrécit encore davantage. En effet, non seulement la Cour note-t-elle (par. 42) que « les demandeurs n’exercent aucune activité publique et n’ont acquis aucune notoriété publique pouvant justifier que leur image devienne matière d’intérêt public », mais elle insiste aussi (par. 43) pour dire que « l’article en question pouvait facilement être écrit sans nécessiter d’y juxtaposer la photo des demandeurs ». Elle trouve donc que le défendeur est en faute et, constatant les dommages moraux causés aux demandeurs par la publication de leur photo, le condamne à leur verser un dédommagement.

Pour reprendre les mots du prof. Trudel, selon la Cour, « [l]e fait qu’une personne se trouve dans l’espace public et affiche un trait caractéristique qui a des échos dans l’actualité ne relèverait pas de l’intérêt public ». Ceci lui paraît troublant. À moi aussi. Comme le prof. Trudel, je suis également troublé par le fait que la Cour considère qu’elle n’a pas à laisser de marge d’appréciation au journaliste sur la façon dont son histoire devrait être racontée ou illustrée.

Je reconnais pourtant la force du contre-argument, qui consisterait à dire qu’un citoyen ordinaire, qui ne recherche pas la notoriété, ne devrait pas avoir à consentir à voir son image en quelque sorte expropriée pour servir d’illustration pour une histoire qui, si elle relève de l’actualité, ne le concerne pas personnellement pour autant. On pourrait peut-être tracer un parallèle avec le projet du gouvernement fédéral d’autoriser les partis politiques à se servir de contenus journalistiques dans leur publicité, outrepassant les droits d’auteur des médias.

Cependant, j’ai tendance à penser que la liberté d’expression et le droit du public à l’information doivent prévaloir dans ce conflit, du moment qu’on parle bien d’une image captée dans un lieu public et qui n’a pas été prise ou manipulée de façon à être humiliante pour la personne en cause. Nous sommes des êtres visuels, nous avons besoin d’illustrations, y compris pour des histoires qui font état d’une tendance sociale plutôt que des faits et gestes d’une personne en particulier. Obtenir le consentement d’une personne à servir d’illustration n’est pas toujours réaliste, et une règle de droit qui n’impose pas cette exigence me semble être, malgré ses coûts évidents, la solution la plus juste au conflit entre les intérêts en cause. Et, à défaut d’une telle règle générale, il faudrait une compréhension de l’intérêt public bien plus large que celle de la Cour supérieure dans Hammedi ou celle de la Cour suprême dans Aubry.

Cela dit, la décision de la Cour supérieure n’est pas un comble de l’activisme et de l’absurdité comme le prétend M. Bastien. Je suis, pour une fois, d’accord avec lui lorsqu’il soutient qu’elle illustre l’insuffisance de la protection de la liberté d’expression dans les Chartes canadienne et québécoise ― telles qu’interprétées par les tribunaux. Cependant, ce résultant n’est pas le seul fait d’un « activisme » des juges. C’est, après tout, le Code civil du Québec, adopté par l’Assemblée nationale, qui restreint notre droit de publier une image d’une personne sans son consentement et qui introduit une notion, non-définie, de l’« information légitime du public ». Un terme aussi vague et flexible doit, inévitablement, être interprété par les tribunaux ― et le législateur le sait fort bien lorsqu’il l’emploie dans sa loi. L’interprétation qu’en a fait la Cour supérieure est peut certes être critiquée (même si elle peut, comme je l’explique ci-haut, aussi être défendue), mais il faut bien reconnaître que c’est une interprétation plausible, qui n’est assurément pas le fait d’une prétendue « idéologie antiraciste », mais simplement d’une conception possiblement trop large du droit à la vie privée.

Surtout, il faut souligner que le législateur conserve le pouvoir d’intervenir et d’étendre la notion de l’intérêt du public à être informé s’il trouve que l’interprétation du Code civil par les tribunaux est trop restrictive. Jusqu’à présent, l’Assemblée nationale n’a pas choisi de le faire. Ce n’est pas la faute des juges, et encore moins celle des Chartes. M. Bastien croit que «les parlementaires […] sont meilleurs [que les juges] à déterminer l’endroit où les droits doivent s’arrêter ». Eh bien, voici l’occasion parfaite de leur adresser des reproches, puisqu’ils sont libres de le faire dans le cas présent.

Par ailleurs, l’attaque à laquelle il se livre contre la Charte canadienne est sans pertinence aucune dans ce contexte. Non seulement la Charte canadienne ne contient-elle pas de garantie générale du droit à la vie privée, mais aussi, et surtout, elle est carrément inapplicable aux rapports entre parties privées qui seuls sont en cause dans un cas comme Hammedi.

Me Lussier a donc raison de critiquer les vitupérations gratuites de M. Bastien. Cependant, dans son souci de défendre les citoyens musulmans que M. Bastien prend pour cible dans son combat contre la religion (non-Catholique) et le multiculturalisme, il me semble faire bien peu de place à la liberté d’expression. Car, s’il a raison de critiquer la médiatisation excessive dont ont fait l’objet les pratiques des religions minoritaires au Québec ces dernières années, s’il a raison de dénoncer le discours hostile, les gestes haineux et le harcèlement dont les adhérents de ces religions ont été victimes, s’il a eu mille fois raison de combattre la Charte de la honte péquiste qui visait à profiter de l’hostilité populaire à ces religions, il n’en reste pas moins que les opinions de nos concitoyens sont des sujets d’intérêt public, ne serait-ce que parce qu’en démocratie, leurs opinions influencent aussi les lois sous lesquelles nous vivons. Et cela inclut leurs opinions religieuses puisque la séparation de l’Église de l’État, la laïcité, est une contrainte qui s’impose justement à l’État et non aux citoyens qui sont libres, eux, de laisser leurs croyances religieuses influencer leurs choix politiques.

Me Lussier me semble donc détourner le débat en insinuant que critiquer le jugement dans Hammedi revient à dire que les « protections [de la vie privée] ne bénéficient pas également à toutes les catégories de citoyens. Les Québécoises voilées, de même que leurs conjoint et enfants, n’ont donc pas les mêmes droits que les Québécoises non voilées ». Ce n’est pas que les Québécoises voilées ont moins de droits que les autres. La question est, justement, de savoir quels droits tous les Québécois devraient avoir. Droit à la vie privée, et droit à la liberté d’expression. On peut, sans adopter une « idéologie anti-antiraciste », penser que les opinions et les pratiques religieuses sont des objets légitimes de l’intérêt et du débat publics, et que ce débat doit pouvoir être illustré avec des images, captées sur la place publique, de citoyens exprimant ces opinions ou s’engageant dans ces pratiques.

La question de la pondération de la liberté d’expression et du droit à la vie privée qui s’est posée dans Hammedi ― et qui se reposera, puisque le défendeur a annoncé, sur le site de son journal, qu’il ira en appel ― est difficile, comme le sont la plupart des questions concernant la pondération de droits. On peut avoir, sur cette question, une position tranchée d’un côté ou d’un autre, mais on doit, par souci d’honnêteté intellectuelle, reconnaître l’importance des arguments contraires. Il est regrettable que des provocateurs ignorants de la trempe de M. Bastien s’en servent pour tenter de faire avancer leur dada idéologique. Il ne l’est pas moins que des gens intelligents et bien-intentionnés, comme Me Lussier, en viennent à en perdre de vue la complexité et les nuances.

ADDENDUM: J’explore quelques pistes de réflexion supplémentaires ici.

Forgotten Balance

Over at Concurring Opinions, Frank Pasquale has a post defending the EU Court of Justice’s decision that enshrined the “right to be forgotten” in European law. Arguing against “a reflexively rejectionist position” which he sees emerging among some American commentators, prof. Pasquale writes that it fails to “recognize the power of certain dominant firms to shape impressions of individuals,” and might lead, by design or otherwise, to an undermining even of the (limited) protections for privacy and reputation which American law recognizes. For my part, I think that prof. Pasquale sets up something of a false dichotomy. There are other options than a free-for-all in which any disclosure of any information is permissible and acceptance of the “right to be forgotten.”

Prof. Pasquale worries about the possibility that people’s medical records or intimate photos will be stolen and posted online. If that happens, he asks,

[a]re the critics of the [right to be forgotten] really willing to just shrug and say, “Well, they’re true facts and the later-publishing websites weren’t in on the hack, so leave them up”?

American law, he explains, provides for some penalties against those who publish purely private information. “Perhaps,” he says, “critics of the [right to be forgotten] want to sweep away these penalties, too. But if they succeed, there will be real human costs.” The right to be forgotten, he concludes, is essential to “guaranteeing a digital future where our reputations aren’t at the mercy of malicious hackers and careless search engines.”

I’m unconvinced. Prof. Pasquale’s concerns are serious, but the right to be forgotten is at once insufficient and excessive to address them.

The information disclosure of which rightly worries prof. Pasquale is intrinsically private. Companies which compile it or to which people entrust it for storage or safekeeping should not disclose it without the consent of the individuals concerned; those who receive such information from people not authorized to communicate it have no business publishing it. The publication of such information is a harm which the law should sanction. But the “right to be forgotten,” at least as articulated by the EU Court of Justice, is at best an indirect protection against this harm. As its name suggests, it is not a right against having private information about you published in the first place. It is not even a right to have private information removed from the websites that originally published it, but only to have links to that information removed from search results. Of course it will make the information that much more difficult to find. More difficult, but not impossible. Something like a (much narrower, as I’ll presently explain) version of the right to be forgotten might be useful to protect us from disclosure of private information, but only as a complement, not an alternative, to going after the actual publishers of such information.

At the same time, the “right to be forgotten” potentially extends to all sorts of information that is not necessarily intrinsically private in the way medical records or intimate pictures are. For instance, back in August, the BBC explained that many of the 12 pages from its website that had been removed from Google’s search results up to that point, concerned court cases ― including those where a defendant had been convicted of a serious crime. (Now, I’ve already written about the difficulties that being mentioned in a court decision can create, and wondered whether anonymizing (at least some) of them would not be better. But, for now at least, the prevailing view is that court cases, including the parties’ names, are generally public matters.) In such cases, there can surely be no question of forcing the actual publishers of the stories to remove them, and the “right to be forgotten” only means, as I recently explained here, that ordinary people, those who do not have much time and/or money for research, will not be able to find them. Even if in some cases a version of the “right to be forgotten” would help us protect what most people will agree is private information, the current European version of this “right” is vastly overbroad.”

So it seems to me that one can easily be against the recognition of a “right to be forgotten” in the shape in which the EU Court of Justice created it, and in favour of protecting people from “malicious hackers and careless search engines” disclosing intrinsically private information about them. It should be possible to craft more narrowly-tailored and more effective regulation, directed in the first instance against the publication of such information and, as a secondary measure, allowing links to infringing information to also be removed. In the inevitable conflict between privacy and freedom of expression, we shouldn’t forget nuance and balance.

The Power of Google

I seem never to have blogged about the “right to be forgotten” enshrined into European law by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in a judgment issued in May. An interesting recent blog post by Paul Bernal allows me to do offer a few random observations on the matter. Better late than never, right?

In a nutshell, the “right to be forgotten” allows a person to request a search provider (for example, Google) to remove links to “inadequate, irrelevant or excessive” ― even if factually correct ― information about that person for search results. If the search provider refuses, the person can ask national privacy authorities to compel the removal. Google is most dissatisfied with being asked to handle thousands of such requests and to weigh the privacy interests of those who make them against the public interest in access to information (as well the freedom of expression of those providing the information in the first instance). It says that it cannot perform this balancing act, and indeed its first stabs at it have sometimes been very clumsy ― so much so that, as prof. Bernal explains, people have suspected it of doing a deliberately poor job so as to discredit the whole concept of the right to be forgotten.

Google has responded by setting up a group of experts ― ostensibly to advise on implementing the right to be forgotten but really, prof. Bernal implies, to make sure that the conversation about it happens on its own terms. And that, according to prof. Bernal, includes not paying attention to “the power of Google” ―its “[p]ower over what is found – and not found” about anyone, reflected by the way we use the phrase “to google someone”; its agenda-setting power; and its ability to influence not only journalists and experts, but also policy-makers. Prof. Bernal points out that Google creates (and tweaks) the algorithms which determine what results appear and in what order when a search is run, and that it has not always upheld freedom of expression at the expense of all other values. Google systematically removes links to websites due to copyright-infringement, as well as for a variety of other reasons. Its right to be forgotten tantrum should be viewed in that context, says prof. Bernal; we mustn’t forget Google power, and the variety of ways in which it exercises it.

Fair enough. I have myself written (notably here and here) about Google’s dual, and conflicted, role as at once a speaker and a censor. Google wants to be treated as a speaker ― and granted freedom of speech ― in designing its search algorithms. It also takes on a role of regulator or censor, whether on behalf of its own values and priorities (commercial or otherwise), those of its clients or partners, or those of governments. And there is a standing danger that Google will be tempted to play its role as regulator and censor of the speech of others in such a way as to gain more leeway (especially from governments) when it comes to is own.

Yet to my mind, this inherent conflict is, if anything, more reason to believe that making Google into an arbiter of private and public interests is a bad idea. The ECJ offloads the responsibility of balancing individual privacy rights and public interest in access to information on Google and its competitors, at least in the first instance, but why would we want to give such a responsibility to companies that have such a twisted set of incentives? Prof. Bernal is right that Google is not an unconditional defender of freedom of expression ― but instead of concluding that it might as well compromise it some more, this time in the name of privacy, isn’t that a reason for thinking that we cannot rely on it to strike the right balance between the rights and interests implicated by the right to be forgotten?

Another thing that we might want to keep in mind when we think of “the power of Google” in the context of the right to be forgotten, is the nature of that power. It is not, like the power of the state, a coercive one. In a sense, Google has a great deal of market power, but the users of its search service hardly feel it as “power.” We know that we have easily accessible alternatives to Google (notably, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo!). We just don’t feel (for the most part) like using them ― for whatever reason, but not because anybody forces us to. And I think it matters that the power of Google is not a collective power of people acting together (like the power of the state) but, if that’s the right word, a composite power ― the sum of a great number of individual actions more or less insignificant by themselves. Despite the fact that, as prof. Bernal rightly points out, Google’s algorithms are not somehow natural or neutral, it is, in a real sense a conduit for the disparate actions and interests of isolated individuals, rather than a vehicle for the expression of their collective will. To me, that makes the power of Google, at least this aspect of it, a rather less threatening one.

It is also a democratizing one. By making it easier to find information about someone, it makes such research accessible not only to those who have a staff of researchers (or police officers, or intelligence agents!) at their disposal, but to ordinary citizens. And this is precisely what worries the advocates of the right to be forgotten. It is indeed a curious right, one that apparently only exists online. Nobody says that libraries or archives should purge information about people once it becomes “irrelevant or excessive.” (Indeed, at least for now, the right to be forgotten does not even require substantive information to be taken down from the Internet, or even links to such information to be removed from ordinary websites. They must, it seems, only be expunged from search results.) So someone with a lot of time and/or money on his or her hands can still find that information. It’s those without resources to expend on an extended investigation who must be deprived of it. That too, I think, is something to keep in mind when thinking about the right to be forgotten.

This all might not amount to very much. Insofar as prof. Bernal calls for nuance and a fuller appreciation of the facts in thinking about the right to be forgotten and Google’s role in implementing it, I second him. If have a distinct message of my own, it is probably that an actor having “power” is not, without more, a reason for pinning any particular responsibility on it. We should be wary of power, whatever its form, but it doesn’t follow that we should burden anyone powerful in whatever way we can think of. If anything, power should be checked and balanced ― balanced, that is, with countervailing powers, not with responsibilities that can, in the hands of the powerful, become excuses for further self-aggrandizement more than limits on their action.

H/t: Yves Faguy

Felix Peccatum

There was an interesting piece in The Atlantic a couple of weeks ago, in which Ethan Zuckerman argued that we should, as the subtitle would have it, “ditch the [internet’s] ad-based business model and build a better web.” Accepting internet content should be free to access, online services free to use, and that the costs of hosting the contents and providing the services can be paid for by tying them to advertising was, Mr. Zuckerman says, “the original sin of the web.” It sounded like a good idea at time, but turned out badly. It is time to repent, and to mend our ways. But is it?

Mr. Zuckerman argues that the ad-based business model created an “internet [that] spies at us at every twist and turn.” In order to persuade potential investors to support a nascent website, its creators must convince them that the ads on that site “will be worth more than everyone else’s ads.” And even if the ads are not actually worth very much, the potential for improvement is in itself something that can be marketed to investors. The way to make the ads on a website worth more than those on others ― say, on Facebook ― requires “target[ing] more and better than Facebook.” And that, in turn, “requires moving deeper into the world of surveillance,” to learn ever more information about the users, so as to make the targeting of ads to them ever more precise.

Over the years, the progressive creep of online tracking and surveillance has

trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see.

Despite occasional episodes of unease over what is going on, even outright manipulation by the providers of online services is not enough to turn their users off. As with private service providers, says Mr. Zuckerman, so with governments:

[u]sers have been so well trained to expect surveillance that even when widespread, clandestine government surveillance was revealed by a whistleblower, there has been little organized, public demand for reform and change.

Trust in government generally has never been lower, yet it seems that online, anything goes.

Mr. Zuckerman points out that the ad-based business model had ― and still has ― upsides too. When it took off, it was pretty much the only way “to offer people free webpage hosting and make money.” Initially at least, most people lacked the means ― the technical means, never mind financial resources ― to pay for online services. Offering them “free” ― that is to say, by relying on advertising instead of user fees to pay for them ― allowed people to starting using them who would never have done so otherwise:

[t]he great benefit of an ad supported web is that it’s a web open to everyone. It supports free riders well, which has been key in opening the web to young people and those in the developing world. Ad support makes it very easy for users to “try before they buy.”

Indeed,

[i]n theory, an ad-supported system is more protective of privacy than a transactional one. Subscriptions or micropayments resolved via credit card create a strong link between online and real-world identity, while ads have traditionally been targeted to the content they appear with, not to the demo/psychographic identity of the user.

In practice, well, we know how that worked out.

Besides, says Mr. Zuckerman, not only did the ad-based internet do away with our privacy, it also produces “clickbait” that nobody really wants to read, is increasingly centralized, and breaks down into interest-based echo chambers.

The solution on which Mr. Zuckerman rests most of his hopes for a redemption of the web is a move from ad-based to subscription based business models. He points out that Google already offers companies and universities the possibility of paying for its products in exchange for not offering their employees or students the ads that support its free Gmail service. And he is confident that “[u]sers will pay for services that they love,” even if a shift to subscription-based business models would also mean that users would simply abandon those for which they have no deep affection. This, in turn, would produce “more competition, less centralization and more competitive innovation.” A shift to subscription-based web service would require new means of payment ― something with lower transaction costs than credit-card systems or PayPal. Such technologies do not yet exist, or at least are not yet fully ready, but Mr. Zuckerman is hopeful that they will come along, and allow us to move away from the “fallen” ad-based internet.

But even if a return to the online garden of Eden ― which, much like “real” one, never actually existed ― were technically possible, would it be desirable? Mr. Zuckerman acknowledges that whatever business model we turn to, “there are bound to be unintended consequences.” Unintended, perhaps, but not entirely unforeseeable. Even if transaction costs can be lowered, a subscription-based internet would be less accessible for many people, in particular those in the less well-off countries, the young, and the economically disadvantaged. Those who, in many way, need it most. Besides, it seems doubtful to me that a subscription-based internet would generate more innovation than the current version. As Mr. Zuckerman points out, the ad-based model has the virtue of letting users try new services easily. It also means that abandoning a service does not mean throwing away the money paid to subscribe to it. It is thus friendlier to newcomers, and less favourable to incumbents, than a subscription-based model. (Just think of the number of new media sources that developed online in the last 15 years ― and compare it with, say, the number of new newspapers that appeared in the previous decades.)

The tracked, surveilled ad-based web has its downsides. But it lowered barriers to entry and allowed the emergence of new voices which, I strongly suspect, could not have been heard without it. (By way of anecdote, I had enough doubt about this blogging thing to begin with that I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have started if I had to pay for it too. Alternatively, I don’t suppose anyone reading this now would have been willing to pay me!) If embracing ads was indeed the internet’s original sin, then I believe that it was, as Augustine suggested of the original original one, felix peccatum ― a fortunate one.

New Ideas and Old

Time to emerge from my holiday hibernation. And it seems fitting to start off the new year with some reflections, or at least a re-hash of some reflections, on the subject of social, technological, and legal change. The immediate occasion for doing so is a column by Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson on the widespread outrage provoked by revelations of the NSA’s data-collecting activities.

Mr. Samuelson argues that these revelations are commonly “stripped of their social, technological and historical context.” The context in question is the fact that “millions upon millions of Americans have consciously and, probably in most cases, eagerly surrendered much of their privacy by embracing the Internet and social media.” For people who disclose all sorts of information about their lives to strangers and to the social media companies to complain about the government collecting some limited kinds of information about them, subject to legal constraints, is “hypocritical.” Besides, the NSA’s activities are also not nearly as intrusive as past government programmes for spying on citizens: during the Vietnam War, “the CIA investigated 300,000 anti-war critics.” However questionable the need for or effectiveness of specific NSA programmes, Mr. Samuelson adds, “[i]n a digitized world, spying must be digitized.” In short, our views on privacy need to take the context of 2014 into account. Some of you may recall an early post of mine in which I discussed a paper by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, arguing that privacy is pretty much dead, because courts treat as private the things that citizens expect to be private, and if citizens, through their online behaviour, demonstrate that they do not expect any information about them to be private, then the courts will act accordingly. Chief Judge Kozinski was worried by this possibility. Mr. Samuelson does not seem to be. Should we?

Mr. Samuelson is right to insist on context, both historical and social, before getting outraged. It is easy to forget that new technologies often do no more than give a new form to things which existed long before. As I suggested here, “[n]ew technologies seem not so much to create moral issues as to serve as a new canvass on which to apply our old concerns.” And there may well be something hypocritical in failing to care about disclosing all kinds of personal information to companies that (try to) make money out of it, yet being furious at governments using similar information to (try to) prevent terrorist attacks. What the NSA does is arguably not as big a deal as some of the outraged think. Yet that does not fully justify Mr. Samuelson’s unconcern. Both he and Chief Judge Kozinski forget that the end of privacy as we had known it need not, and arguably does not, mean the end of privacy tout court. Old norms about what is and what is not private are breaking down under the pressure of technological change. But that does not mean that new ones do not emerge.

In particular, the norm that seems to be replacing near-categorical prohibitions on using certain sorts of information is one that makes all sorts of personal information fair game subject to the consent of the person concerned. Attempts to prohibit email providers from “reading” the contents of our messages look silly considering the hundreds of millions of people who use Gmail knowing that Google does just that ― but the point is that they know what is going on. Similarly, people accept to share information on Facebook, so long as they know they are sharing it ― but they are unhappy when Facebook tries to expand the visibility of the things they shared without telling them. This example also hints another important norm in the new privacy universe ― one of differentiated, rather than categorical, privacy. The fact that we accept to share information with some people or organizations does not mean that we are willing to share it with others.

Arguably, these norms aren’t exactly new. For instance, we always shared some things with our friends that we kept from our parents, and told parents things we wouldn’t admit to our friends. Even before Facebook, few things were private in the sense of nobody knowing about them. But new technologies make the choices to tell and not to tell more pervasive, more nuanced, and more explicit than they perhaps had to be before. They also make the relativity of privacy more apparent.

The problem with the NSA data collection, as others have said before, is arguably not so much its substance as the lack of consent and awareness of those affected. That, rather than the collection of personal information as such, is what contravenes the key norms of the new privacy paradigm. And to the extent that the outrage about the NSA’s activities caused by this violation, it is not all hypocritical.

I’m not sure there is much of a point to these ramblings. I’m still trying to write my way into the new year.

What’s Missing from this Picture?

The Supreme Court does not live by the Senate alone. This morning, it delivered a decision on the interaction of the rights to privacy and freedom of expression, Alberta (Information and Privacy Commissioner) v. United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 401, 2013 SCC 62, finding Alberta’s privacy-protection legislation unconstitutional as an overbroad restriction of legitimate expressive activity. Yet important though its subject is, the decision raises as many or indeed more questions than it answers.

The case arose out of the respondent union’s filming people who were crossing, or simply found themselves near, its picket line as it was engaged in a (lawful) strike. Several of those thus filmed, including a manager, whose image the union used in materials it distributed to its striking members and some members of the public who had nothing to do with the labour dispute and whose images were apparently never used, complained to the Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner. An adjudicator appointed by the commissioner found that the union violated Alberta’s Privacy and Information Protection Act‘s broad prohibition on collecting and using “personal information” about individuals without their consent. The adjudicator also found that, although the union’s purpose was expressive and related to its legitimate activities (the union sought, for example, to inform the public and its members about the labour dispute it was involved in, to dissuade people from crossing its picket line, and to collect evidence of both its peaceful activity and of any altercations that might arise), its activities did not fall with PIPA‘s narrow exceptions.

The adjudicator was precluded from considering the constitutionality of PIPA‘s interference with freedom of expression. On judicial review, both the Court of Queen’s Bench and the Alberta Court of Appeal found that the application of PIPA to the union’s activities in this case was a breach of the freedom of expression protected by s. 2(b) of the Charter, and that it was not justified by s. 1. The Supreme Court unanimously agrees.

Since PIPA operated to prohibit the union’s expressive activities, the Court “conclude[d] without difficulty that it restricts freedom of expression” (par. 17). PIPA, to be sure has an worthy purpose, the protection of privacy being of great importance and privacy legislation being, indeed, “quasi-constitutional” (a term whose meaning, I have argued here, is not quite clear), and is obviously related to that purpose. But its “broad restrictions are not justified because they are disproportionate to the benefits the legislation seeks to promote” (par. 20). In the labour context, freedom of expression is very important to mitigate “the presumptive imbalance between the employer’s economic power and the relative vulnerability of the individual worker” (par. 32), to sway public opinion, and thus to achieve the workers’ collective goals. Yet PIPA applies “without regard for the nature of the personal information, the purpose for which it is collected, used or disclosed, and the situational context for that information” (par. 25). In this case, the information at issue was not especially sensitive: people were filmed in a public place, and “[n]o intimate details of the lifestyle or personal choices of the individuals were revealed” (par. 26). However laudable its goals, PIPA is much too broad.

In the result, the Court strikes down the PIPA in its entirety, suspending the declaration of invalidity for a year to allow the legislature to achieve a better balance between privacy and freedom of expression. It does not say much about where that balance lies, merely noting that its “conclusion does not require that we condone all of the Union’s activities” and that “like privacy, freedom of expression is not an absolute value [so that] both the nature of the privacy interests implicated and the nature of the expression must be considered” (par. 38).

This cautious approach might be sensible in dealing with a broad and evolving subject like privacy, but the decision does leave one with many questions. One question is what to make of the Court’s failure to consider or so much as mention what is usually the crucial stage of s. 1 analysis: the “minimal impairment” question of whether a statute’s objectives can be achieved without compromising Charter rights as much as it does. Is this omission case-specific (due either to the ease of resolving the case on another stage of the s. 1 analysis or to the Court’s reluctance to discuss alternative regulatory schemes, so as not to narrow the legislature’s choices in advance), or a signal of a broader change in the Court’s approach to s. 1? Probably the former, but we have to wait and see.

Another concerns the importance of context. The Court makes much of the importance of freedom of expression generally and of picketing tactics specifically to labour unions, but there are other situations in which the conflict between freedom of expression and privacy might arise. For example, I discussed the issue of potential applicability of privacy laws to political parties here. PIPA’s paragraph 4(3)(m) specifically exempts political parties, but of course the Court’s decision is guidance for dealing with other privacy legislation as well. As I suggested then, “[d]epending on the outcome of th[is] case, political parties might be able to challenge any extension of the privacy legislation to cover their activities.” The outcome certainly suggests that this is so, but we cannot quite tell just what role the special context of labour disputes played in the Court’s decision, and whether it would approach the activities of political parties (which, I have suggested, can seem quite creepy) differently.

These, I think, are important issues. The Supreme Court has resolved one specific issue, but the big picture of the relationship between freedom of expression and privacy is far from complete.

Its Own Place

“The mind is its own place,” says Milton’s Satan. And since computers have, for all practical purposes, replaced our brains, so are those, right? The Supreme Court of Canada, at any rate, agrees. In a case decided last week, R. v. Vu, 2013 SCC 60, it held that police cannot search a computer on the basis of a warrant to search the place in which the computer is found. The search of the computer requires a separate warrant.

As Justice Cromwell, writing for the unanimous court, explains,

The traditional legal framework holds that once police obtain a warrant to search a place for certain things, they can look for those things anywhere in the place where they might reasonably be; the police do not require specific, prior authorization to search in receptacles such as cupboards and filing cabinets. The question before us is whether this framework is appropriate for computer searches; in short, should our law of search and seizure treat a computer as if it were a filing cabinet or a cupboard? (Par. 1)

The answer is that it should not, because “computer searches give rise to particular privacy concerns that are not sufficiently addressed by that approach” (par. 2).

The search warrant which the police had obtained authorized a search “documentation” that would prove the ownership and occupation of the appellant’s residence. The main question for the Court was whether this was enough to authorize the police to look for such documents on the computers (or cell phones) that they might find in the residence, in addition to looking for any physical copies.

Searching a computer says Justice Cromwell, is not the same thing as searching the physical space of a residence. The amount of data to be found on a computer is huge, and that data includes things “that users cannot control, that they may not even be aware of or may have chosen to discard and which may not be, in any meaningful sense, located in the place of the search” (par. 24). From the standpoint of the privacy interests they engage, computers are unprecedented technology, unlike anything the law has had to deal with in the past. The same thing goes for cell phones: “present day phones have capacities that are, for our purposes, equivalent to those of computers” (par. 38). Not only can computers hold information that would fill up whole libraries, but they record the websites they are used to visit, the terms they are used to research, and the history of the editing of the documents they are used to create. And theirs, rather like ours in fact, is a memory that does not really forget even told to do so: a computer does not actually delete a file, but merely makes the disk space it occupied available for reuse should the need arise. Finally, a computer ― unlike, say a filing cabinet ― gives one access to information that is not physically located on it, perhaps, “in the cloud,” on servers half a world away. In short, for the police to find something in a physical place, someone needs to have put it there, and no one must have thrown it out; neither of these conditions holds on a computer.

Because computers contain information that is thus so different from information that can be found by searching a physical place, a distinct judicial authorization is required to search a computer ― an authorization to search the place where the computer is found is not enough. Nor is after-the-fact review of the reasonableness of the search of a computer. Justice Cromwell concludes that “the privacy interests at stake when computers are searched require that those devices be treated, to a certain extent, as a separate place” (par. 51).

The way it will work in practice, he explains, is that

[i]f police come across a computer in the course of a search and their warrant does not provide specific authorization to search computers, they may seize the computer (assuming it may reasonably be thought to contain the sort of things that the warrant authorizes to be seized), and do what is necessary to ensure the integrity of the data. If they wish to search the data, however, they must obtain a separate warrant (par. 49).

Such warrant need not, however, set out a detailed protocol for the search, or exclude in advance some “areas” of the computer to be searched. Not only are such protocols likely to be difficult to draw up in advance, but after-the-fact review will also allow courts to develop better rules for governing future searches of computers. A warrant can, in appropriate cases, impose conditions on how a computer is to be searched, but it need not always do so.

Sounds right to me. And it is worth pointing out, I think, that this case illustrates the development of new privacy expectations that come with new technologies. As I suggested here, the influence of technology on privacy rights is unlikely to be a one-way ratchet leading to the eventual disintegration of the idea of privacy. Some ideas of what is and what is not private will disappear in the digital world. Others will not. And others still will appear which did not exist before. Although I have regularly expressed my skepticism about courts’ ability to deal with new technologies, this case provides grounds for at least some optimism.

Sociétés Anonymes?

I have posted a number of times about the problem of (unwanted) publicity which the appearance of one’s name in judicial decisions might bring (my posts on this topic are collected here). Because judicial decisions are widely and freely available on the internet, being identified as a party to a lawsuit can damage one employment prospects; it can reveal details about one’s personal life, financial situation, or health problems; it can even, in an extreme case, be outright dangerous. So I have been wondering aloud whether we would not do well to apply the rule which Québec already has for family law cases: the parties are not identified in the courts’ reasons for judgment. In this way, the public can still, as I put in an earlier post, “know what evidence was before the court and what the court did with it,” which is important for keeping the law accessible and the courts accountable, but without compromising the actual people involved.

I want to come back to this question, because I think that my previous attempts to grapple with it missed an important issue. All of the cases which my previous posts on this topic discussed involved individuals, at least as parties seeking anonymity. But much litigation involves corporations rather than physical persons. If we think about expanding the anonymization of cases, then we must address the issue of what to do about corporate parties. Is anonymity warranted for them too? It is interesting that the only categorical anonymity rules in Canadian law (at least those that I am aware of) concerns types of cases where corporations cannot be involved, namely family law proceedings in Québec and criminal cases were the accused is a minor. But could a requirement of anonymity, or even an entitlement to anonymity, be applied in “ordinary” cases which might involve corporate as well as individual parties?

These questions, in turn, force us to think again about the purpose of anonymity, even for individuals. Is the reason we anonymize certain cases the protection of privacy or that of reputation? These two interests are closely related, but not identical. (Actually, this might be a controversial assertion. The Supreme Court has invoked privacy as a reason for protecting individual reputations. I think this is wrong, but I cannot defend this claim here. I will only say that privacy, in my view, is a right to be left alone; it would matter even on a desert island. Reputation, by contrast, only makes sense in a context where you associate with others. It is the opinion others have of you.)

In some cases, the driving concern is surely privacy ― as in A.B. v. Bragg Communications Inc., 2012 SCC 46, [2012] 2 S.C.R. 567, where the Supreme Court authorized a teenager who was the victim of cyberbullying to proceed anonymously against her tormentors. But in other cases, I am not so sure. Is it really privacy, for instance, that justifies hiding the identities of minors who are accused ― and even of those who are convicted ― of crimes? Unlike, say, that teenager’s personal life, a crime, especially one that has been proven in court, is not exactly a private matter. It personally concerns a number of people other than the perpetrator, it concerns the state, and it possibly concerns the public at large. Arguably, the better reason for anonymity in such cases is a solicitude for the reputation of the accused, for their ability eventually to make a life for themselves free from the stain of the faults of their youth.

The distinction matters because it would be, it seems to me, somewhat strange to say that corporations have a right to privacy which the law ought to protect. The law does, however, protect corporate reputations. (For example, corporations are capable of suing in defamation ― in Canada at least (as well as in the UK); some Australian states have severely limited their ability to do so.) If the reason for anonymity in judicial decision is privacy, corporations should not benefit from it. If it is reputation ― well, the question is more difficult.

As I suggested in an earlier post, “there is … a legitimate public interest in knowing what is happening to whom, or who exactly is involved in stories that attract attention.” There is also a legitimate public interest in knowing that somebody ― whether an individual or a corporation ― is “bad guy,” which a judicial decision can reveal. A blanket rule of anonymity for any and all cases would surely be a bad idea (quite apart from questions about its constitutionality). But what about more limited rules? What about rules that allow the successful party (whether plaintiff or defendant) to remain anonymous? Would such rules even be workable? I’m not sure about that. Much as before, I have very few answers here. I just wanted to add another consideration to my and, I hope, your ongoing reflection.

Not Private Parties

The development and use of massive voter databases and sophisticated “micro-targeting” techniques by political parties are raising concerns about the privacy rights of the people targeted by these efforts. When I wrote about the use of these techniques by the Obama campaign in the last presidential election in the United States, I suggested that “the future is creepy.” I am not the only one to think about this stuff, of course. The CBC had a story about the use of databases by Canadian parties, not only to identify and turn out their own supporters, but also to discourage opponents’ supporters from voting, though it did not specifically discuss privacy issues. Radio-Canada’s internet blogger, Vincent Grou, raises them in a recent post, and points to a report on the topic prepared last year for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada by Colin J. Bennett and Robin M. Bayley.

The main takeaway from this report is that, although parties now collect and use large amounts of information about voters, members, donors, activists, and candidates, they are not subject to the existing privacy legislation in Canada, which typically only applies to governments and to commercial enterprises, except for British Columbia’s Personal Information Protection Act, S.B.C. 2003 c. 63. (Readers with good memories may remember me saying the contrary in the post linked to above. I was wrong. Mea culpa.) This is troubling, because parties do not respect the rules that other organizations are subject to, and put Canadians’ personal information at risk. At the same time, parties are very important in the Canadian democratic process, in particular in organizing and promoting political participation. Thus, “in general terms, the debate centers on the balance between the two values of personal privacy and political participation” (3).

There report also notes a number of background factors which this debate must take into account. One is the continuing decline of the importance of parties for mobilizing the electorate, and loss of public trust in parties. In this context, the report argues, one party’s sins of commission (such as an abuse of information on voters) or omission (such as a failure to protect information) might prove very harmful for the democratic system as a whole. A second is that the technologies which parties use directly (their databases and data-mining software) or indirectly (for example social networks on which they can gather information) are developing very quickly, and thus the parties’ behaviour is difficult to regulate in ways that will make sense not only at present, but also in the future. Yet another point to keep in mind is that in many ways, the new data-mining and micro-targeting methods are developments of existing practices rather than completely new phenomena. Parties have long made efforts to identify their likely voters ― but the new technologies allow them to take these programmes to a much higher level.

Another interesting part of the report is its survey of practices in other democratic countries. They vary widely. In continental Europe, parties are subject to privacy regulations, and micro-targeting is apparently not developed. By contrast, in the United States, privacy rules are much less extensive and do not apply to political parties (which indeed are shielded from much regulation by the constitutional protection of freedom of speech).

Although prof. Bennett and Mr. Bailey do not say so in the report’s conclusion, they seem to favour at least some form of regulation of the political parties’ behaviour with respect to privacy. They acknowledge the difficulty of striking the right balance between what they consider to be the parties’ special role in our democracy and the citizens’ privacy concerns. But they are unimpressed with the parties’ purported attempts at self-regulation in this respect ― their privacy policies, when they exist at all, are hard to find, vague, or incomplete. And they worry not only about the privacy interests of citizens but also about the risks for the political system as a whole if one or more parties fail, or are regarded as having failed, to protect the privacy of the millions of people about whom they collect information.

This is all very interesting and worth thinking about. But I would like to suggest a few other factors to add to our reflection.

One is the possibility, which I raised in my previous post, that constitutional law has something to say on the subject of the permissibility of regulating the gathering and use of data by political parties. As I noted then, the Supreme Court is now considering a case in which a union argues that its constitutionally protected activities should be exempt from the application of provincial privacy legislation. The activities of political parties too enjoy some constitutional protection, the Supreme Court having recognized their special role in the electoral process. Depending on the outcome of that case, political parties might be able to challenge any extension of the privacy legislation to cover their activities.

In this connection, another point to keep in mind is the difference between rules that limit the parties ability to gather information about voters and those that would attempt to make them better custodians of the information they collect, for example by requiring better security measures or training for the party workers and volunteers who handle personal information. The former sort of regulations, I should think, would be more problematic than the latter.

Another concern when thinking about possible regulation is the congruence of the proposed rules with the expectations and practices of the people being burdened, and those purportedly being protected, by the regulation ― here, respectively, the parties and the citizens. On the side of the parties, it is worth noting that Canadian political parties are actively trying to learn from their American counterparts. They are thus taking on board the practices and expectations of what might be the world’s least regulated environment from a privacy standpoint. The more they do so, the more difficult and intrusive forcing them to change their ways is going to be. As for the citizens, the report notes that Canadians say they are very concerned about their privacy. But deeds do not necessarily match words, and it is not clear that regulations should protect people in accordance with their stated wishes when they themselves seem not to act on them.

A final point I will make here is that we might want to question one of the report’s important assumptions ― the special role of political parties. I have written a good deal about why should be skeptical of campaign spending rules that favour political parties (here, here, and here). As the report notes, parties are losing the importance they once had ― but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is not so obvious that they ought to benefit from special rules with respect to privacy, though I am not saying that they ought not to ― it’s a difficult question.

As it stands, Canadian political parties are not very respectful of our privacy. Whether to try to make them more so, and how, are difficult questions. They are bound to become more pressing as the parties’ gathering and use of data on voters continues and increases, and we would do well to start thinking about them now.