The tech industry isn’t quieting down about privacy and competition concerns arising from Canada’s proposed “lawful access” bill.
The news: A group of Canadian and European tech companies sent an open letter to ministers of industry and public safety on Thursday, outlining their ongoing concerns with Bill C-22. The letter argued that the proposed legislation would “erode trust” in Canada’s tech industry and weaken the competitive landscape.
Among the Canadian signatories were Toronto-based Tailscale, Toronto-based Windscribe, logistics company Gobolt, Coinbase’s Canadian subsidiary, and Fredericton-based Beauceron Security.
From the source: “Canada should be able to support legitimate investigations without making secure systems easier to attack, and without making Canadian companies less competitive globally as more countries look for trusted, sovereign infrastructure,” Tailscale CEO and co-founder Avery Pennarun said in a statement accompanying the letter.
Windscribe CEO Yegor Sak, who has previously argued against the legislation, said the bill would make Canada an “untenable” place for foreign and domestic tech companies to operate.
The context: The proposed legislation would give law enforcement and CSIS expanded powers to access Canadians’ digital information from service providers for use in investigations. Upon its introduction, the bill immediately raised concerns from Canadian civil liberties groups—which argued it would give police unprecedented surveillance powers—and foreign and domestic tech companies, which said complying with the law would force them to break user trust. The bill would apply to digital service providers with subscribers in Canada, regardless of their country of origin.
Virtual private network providers Windscribe and secure messaging platform Signal have threatened to take operations out of Canada if they had to comply with the bill as written. Tailscale told The Globe and Mail that it would have to “pursue corporate structures” to distance its international operations from Canada.
The government made some changes to the bill, including reducing the amount of time providers would be required to store users’ metadata from one year to six months. But to the companies that signed this week’s letter, concerns still remain.
Final thought: The Canadian government is pushing the bill forward amid concerns about digital privacy, while moving through the legislation to update Canada’s privacy law and ensure Canadians have more control over their digital privacy. But while the privacy bill (C-36) has only completed its first reading, the controversial “lawful access” bill is much closer to being passed, and now under review in the Senate.
Feature image courtesy UK Home Office. Photo by Niklas Hallen.