The IT Nerd

You might remember that Canadian telco Bell Canada was tracking their users online activities unless they opt out of the program so that they could create detailed profiles about them for advertisers. And to make a few bucks off of that as well. That seems to have come to an end for now. The Canadian Privacy Comissioner has told Bell that what they’re doing is not cool:

In a report made public last Tuesday, [Privacy Commissioner Daniel] Therrien’s office ruled the program violated federal privacy laws, and should be limited to only those customers who explicitly volunteer to be tracked.

Bell initially blew the commissioner off. But they changed their tune when the report was made public. The telco is now going stop tracking users and delete the data that they’ve collected. That’s cool. Except for the fact that Bell is also going to reintroduce the program and ask users to opt in. Honestly, I would never do that and I cannot see why anyone else would. Which is why Bell made it an opt out program rather than an opt in program. But at least its legal now. Hopefully the Privacy Commissioner is keeping an eye on them to make sure that they don’t do anything else that violates privacy laws in Canada.

This entry was posted on April 14, 2015 at 8:33 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Bell, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.