STATSCAN SCOOPED UP 15 YEARS OF PERSONAL FINANCIAL DATA FROM CANADIAN CREDIT BUREAU (BASTARDS MOVING ON COMPLETE SURVEILLANCE)
As Statistics Canada plans to build a massive new personal information bank with the real-time financial transaction data of hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Global News has learned the agency has scooped up 15 years’ worth of credit rating information from a major international credit bureau which could include millions of Canadians. The data harvest was done without the consent or knowledge of those Canadians whose credit history was passed on Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada, which has broad powers to compel any organization to turn over data that organization collects, directed the credit bureau TransUnion of Canada Inc., based in Burlington, Ont., to provide social insurance numbers, names, addresses, dates-of-birth and detailed credit information, including balances owed, balances overdue, and more than 30 other fields or categories of data.
Statistics Canada could not immediately say how many records were retrieved from TransUnion. TransUnion confirmed the data transfer but would not say how many records were transferred, but implied it was not its entire Canadian consumer data set.
Canada’s privacy commissioner, Daniel Therrien, noted in his recent annual report to Parliament that Statistics Canada is increasingly using its statutory powers to obtain detailed data about Canadians from their mobile phone companies, utility providers and credit bureaus.
“Federal Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer said Tuesday there are “legitimate privacy concerns”
“It caught many, many Canadians by surprise,” Scheer said while speaking at the Toronto Real Estate Board’s annual meeting. “We have a government entity that is not just going to get a snapshots of the population, but specific transactional data about where you’ve been spending your money, what you’ve been putting on your credit card. I believe that is unacceptable.”
“It just never occurred to me that [Statistics Canada] would go directly to our banks and seek our sensitive financial data without at the very least any notification to me let alone getting my consent,” said Ann Cavoukian, a former Ontario privacy commissioner, in an interview Monday. “So that lack of Transparency, I think, is very problematic.”
The Canadian Bankers’ Association, which represents the country’s largest financial institutions, has indicated that it has concerns about the project and expected more discussion before Statistics Canada proceeded with the project.
On its Twitter account Tuesday, one of Canada’s largest banks, The Royal Bank of Canada, tried to assure a customer nervous about the project by saying, “we’ll only use [collected data] for the purposes listed in our client agreements. Before using info for a purpose not listed, we first obtain consent. No customer transaction data or other personal info has been transferred to Stats Canada.”
Shed a little light on this please @RBC. Will you be releasing personal banking information to Kim Jong…….I mean Trudeau. Yes or no?
RBC protects the privacy of our clients’ info, which we'll only use for the purposes listed in our client agreements. Before using info for a purpose not listed, we first obtain consent. No customer transaction data or other personal info has been transferred to Stats Canada
TransUnion of Canada is a subsidiary of TransUnion Inc. Chicago, which maintains a database of the credit scores of 1 billion consumers in more than 30 countries including Canada.
https://globalnews.ca/news/4610259/statcan-canadian-personal-credit-bureau-data/?utm_source=notification/