Canadians can learn new things about your personal data by requesting access to it from companies. What can be found out varies by company and there can be some hurdles to overcome before you get access.

The DIY Transparency Report tool helps smaller organizations produce holistic transparency reports. Such reports comprehensively explain to customers, citizens, and government agencies alike how an organization can, and does, receive and respond to government requests. It does so by guiding organizational members through the process of developing a holistic report, while empowering them to customize their reports to reflect their organizational profile.

The report, authored by Postdoctoral Fellow Christopher Parsons, examines how contemporary telecommunications surveillance is governed in Canada. He concludes that serious failures in transparency and accountability indicate that corporations are failing to manage Canadians’ personal information responsibly and that government irresponsibility surrounding accountability strains its credibility and aggravates citizens’ cynicism about the political process.

Christopher Parsons, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and managing director of the Telecom Transparency Project, spoke to Canada.com regarding how discussions around privacy shifted in 2014 and what to expect in 2015.

This post provides a summary of early findings associated with Canadians creating right to information requests using the Access My Info tool. It discusses several themes emergent from an analysis of company responses to such requests.

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.

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.

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.

Christopher Parsons was interviewed by a number of news outlets throughout April, loosely on the subjects of national security, critical digital infrastructure, and government transparency.

Christopher Parsons was interviewed by a number of media outlets throughout March, focusing on government access to telecommunications data held by private companies, and on companies’ internal data handling practices.