Who’s Watching You

Have you ever noticed the eyes watching you on the internet? You take a look at a cottage for sale and all of sudden you're inundated with real estate ads. You purchase something on the internet and suddenly similar products keep showing up in your inbox.

This is not a chance occurrence. You are being watched!

Back in 2019, Facebook paid a $5 billion fine and a £500,000 fine for privacy violations. After that, you'd have thought that data mining companies would get the message that tracking private information is unacceptable. But . . . a similar lawsuit was brought against Google in 2020.

Google awaits the approval of a judge on a lawsuit for secretly tracking people's private internet use. Google will destroy billions of data records as part of the settlement. This has been valued between $5 to $7.8 billion. Google had been privy to information about users' friends, hobbies, favourite foods, shopping habits, and visits to private websites.

In June of 2022, our government passed the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022. Open Media assessed how protected Canadians' privacy is under this new law. Their Campaigns Director Matt Hatfield said, "Bill C-27 includes neither limits on the collection and sale of our data through the data broker economy, nor recognition that our right to privacy is a fundamental human right."

According to Jill Clayton, Alberta's Privacy Commissioner, "The [Canadian] laws have no teeth." This was after Tim Horton's was found to have violated Canadians' privacy by tracking their customers' movements at home, at work and even visits to a rival coffee shop.

Our Federal Privacy Commission, Daniel Therrien, said that Tim Horton's wasn't an isolated example. They are just the ones that got caught.

Did all of these incidents take care of the privacy problem? No! We're still being watched, and our private information is still being mined by Facebook, Google and other companies who can sell it for marketing products.

Did you know that as you visit websites many of them have 'bots' tracking you, recording information about where you've gone on the web and what you do on each site, and reporting it back to the creator of the 'bot' to be used for profit?

I thought I was well protected on my computers until I discovered there were some leaks that needed to be plugged. I downloaded "duckduckgo" Safari Extension to enhance the protection on my computer.

Today, I checked to see what websites were watching me, or trying to peek past my privacy program.

Did you know that on the Conservative Party website there are 6 third party trackers mining information about YOU for advertising? Third Party Trackers do not report only to the Conservative Party to give statistics on their site, but they also store and utilize the information for other advertisers on their network. The advertisersexchange advertising for profit using the information gleaned by . . . third parties such as Facebook and Google who the Conservative Party has permitted to gather information about YOU!

My curiosity piqued, I checked the Liberal Party, which has 10 third party trackers; the NDP also checked in with a whopping 10. The other parties represented in Parliament also had third party trackers for advertising.

CHP Canada, being true to our policies, which protect Canadians' privacy, has no advertising trackers including the Facebook pixel. We do not provide information about people who visit our site to Facebook, Google, Microsoft or others. We maintain anonymized statistics, utilizing privacy focused companies, for us to analyze visits to the pages on our website.

Many sites have third party trackers that exchange YOUR informationfor profit. How secure do you feel with that? According to a leaked document written by privacy engineers at Facebook, they do not "have an adequate level of control and explainability over how our systems use data," Does that make you feel that your private information is secure?

CHP Canada would implement laws protecting Canadians from privacy violations. Here's an excerpt from our Policy Book:

Personal Privacy

(a): A person's personal information, data, and communication in any form and by any means, generated by the person or in the course of events imposed on the person by any other individual, entity, system or device so authorized, shall remain the person's personal property exclusively: to access, to delete, to hold private, or to share, sell, trade, in whole or in part, with or without further limitations, conditions, to another individual or organization.

(b): A person has a right to know and be informed, to whom or what, to where, his or her personal information was distributed or transferred either as individualized or bulk data.

Canadian laws need to protect Canadians from 21st Century problems. It's time to rethink what political party best represents Canadians. This isn't 1950, you have more electoral choices than your grandfather had. There's a whole new political landscape out there.

Join CHP Canada today!

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