I could not understand WHY StatsCan would alienate Canadians the way it has been doing – – lying, harassing, always demanding MORE – MORE data, personal data. Below – – the light dawns!
And I am laughing. “re-spendable” revenue! There’s new vocabulary from the Orwellian dictionary for you!
RE: StatsCan’s “Custom data business“: There were loud complaints in the past about StatsCan selling data. It’s somewhere on this blog. I’ll find it. So then, StatsCan announced that it was shutting down the shop. Hurrah! ? BUT! see below. If ever they DID stop, it was for the summer holidays.
What a beastly conflict-of-interest. No wonder they went after citizens for personal data like hounds on the chase. (ref. 2018-11-12 My reply to “StatsCan plan to scoop customer spending data from banks”).
In 2017, StatCan posted $113 million of what it calls “re-spendable” revenue and employed 400 full-time data collectors for this custom data business.
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By David Akin
(BOTTOM HALF OF THE ARTICLE)
. . . “Your government has not done a very good job of managing Statistics Canada,” Conservative MP Michael Chong told Bains at Monday’s committee meeting. “This is data that is far more intrusive than anything we’ve seen before at a level that would make [Google subsidiary] Alphabet and Amazon blush.”
In the meantime, Conservative MPs had new questions Monday for both Bains and Statistics Canada about StatCan’s decades-old practice of selling custom slices of data it holds to the private sector and how that business might be affected by this new plan to harvest bank data.
“This data is going to be used by some of the largest companies in the world in order to market their services to Canadians and your government proposes to use the coercive power of the state … to get this data,” Chong said to Bains at Monday’s committee meeting. “I think it’s big-time overreach on part of your government.”
In 2017, StatCan posted $113 million of what it calls “re-spendable” revenue and employed 400 full-time data collectors for this custom data business.
StatCan saw this custom data business shrink by 25 per cent between 2012 and 2015 after the previous Harper government made the mandatory long-form census optional. Many social scientists said that decision made the census data next to useless. Many of Statistics Canada business customers appear to have thought so as well as StatCan’s revenue earned by selling its data dropped from $114 million in 2012 to $86 million in 2015.
But when the Trudeau Liberals made the long-form census mandatory again in 2015, gave Statistics Canada new independence, and provided it with new powers to create projects like the planned bank transaction data collection project, it appears to have made StatCan more valuable in the eyes of business users. StatCan’s sales to the private sector quickly blossomed by 32 per cent from 2015 to 2017.
Albas said he believes StatCan’s revenue from this custom data service will “skyrocket” when business users learn it includes data StatCan has forced from Canada’s banks and credit card companies.
“This information is highly valued by large multinationals who want to sell more of their products,” Albas said.
At no time does Statistics Canada sell or provide, under any circumstance, any personal information it holds. Instead, it packages up data about groups of Canadians, most often sorted by their “forward sort area” — the first three letters of someone’s postal code — so that businesses or marketing organizations might know where, for example, families with young children or Punjabi speakers live.
Albas said the proposed project to collect bank transaction data would make StatCan’s data even more valuable to business users — at the expense, he said, of the privacy rights of Canadians.
- With files from Andrew Russell
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