This edition of Social Media Watch deals with top court rulings on digital privacy, social media monitoring, and mobile security news.

Post-doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons spoke with a variety of media organizations over the past month about his research and pressing events that have taken place in the Canadian telecommunications landscape. He generally discussed lawful access to telecommunications data, the release of transparency reports by Canadian Internet service providers, and the unveiling of an access to personal information tool.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke with The Globe and Mail’s telecom reporter Christine Dobby about recent issues related to the privacy of telecommunications customers’ personal information.

This post first identifies the individual and collective benefits of using the Access My Info tool to request access to one’s personal data held by Canadian data operators. It then discusses technical design decisions that went into the tool’s development and implementation.

By getting into the malware business the federal and potentially provincial governments of Canada would be confronted with an ongoing reality: is the role of government to maximally protect its citizens, including from criminals leveraging vulnerabilities to spy on Canadians, or is it to partially protect citizens so long as such protections do not weaken the state’s ability to secure itself from persons suspected of violating any Act of Parliament?

Social Media Watch returns with updates from the EU and US legal landscape, some notable cases of government access to personal data, and an overview of some important reports describing the need for updated regulation in the data economy.

Citizen Lab Post-doctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons was interviewed on CBC News on 8 May about state cyber surveillance in Canada.

In this post we explain how Canadians can issue requests to their telecommunications companies to learn what personal information those companies collect, retain, and disclose about them. We argue that Canadians should do this both to empower themselves and to enable Canadian policy experts and government officials to better hold the companies to account.

Penney writes about how the Fair Elections Act will make it even easier for Canadian political parties to access our personal information and undermine democracy.

In this post we analyze the partial disclosures concerning Canada’s federal agencies’ domestic telecommunications surveillance practices. We argue that key federal agencies remain unaccountable to Parliamentarians and the Canadian public alike, and that accountability measures are urgently needed for Canadians to understand the extent of their federal government’s surveillance activities.