Why is this Canadian university scared of you seeing its Privacy Impact Assessment?
I'm coming to DEFCON! On Aug 9, I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On Aug 10, I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).
Barbra Streisand is famous for many things: her exciting performances on the big screen, the small screen, and the stage; her Grammy-winning career as a musician (she's a certified EGOT!); and for all the times she's had to correct people who've added an extra vowel to the spelling of her first name (I can relate!).
But a thousand years from now, her legacy is likely to be linguistic, rather than artistic. The "Streisand Effect" – coined by Mike Masnick – describes what happens when someone tries to suppress a piece of information, only to have that act of attempted suppression backfire by inciting vastly more interest in the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The term dates to 2003, when Streisand sued the website Pictopia and its proprietors for $50m for reproducing an image from the publicly available California Coastal Records Project (which produces a timeseries of photos of the California coastline in order to track coastal erosion). The image ("Image 3850") incidentally captured the roofs of Streisand's rather amazing coastal compound, which upset Streisand.
But here's the thing: before Streisand's lawsuit, Image 3850 had only been viewed six times. After she filed the case, another 420,000 people downloaded that image. Not only did Streisand lose her suit (disastrously so – she was ordered to pay the defendants' lawyers $177,000 in fees), but she catastrophically failed in her goal of keeping this boring, obscure photo from being seen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Streisand has since called the suit "a mistake." On the one hand, that is very obviously true, but on the other hand, it's still admirable, given how many other failed litigants went to their graves insisting that their foolish and expensive legal gambit was, in fact, very smart and we are all very stupid for failing to understand that.
Which brings me to Ian Linkletter and the Canadian Privacy Library. Linkletter is the librarian and founder of the nonprofit Canadian Privacy Library, a newish online library that collects and organizes privacy-related documents from Canadian public institutions. Linkletter kicked off the project with the goal of collecting the Privacy Impact Assessments from every public university in Canada, starting in his home province of BC.
These PIAs are a legal requirement whenever a public university procures a piece of software, and they're no joke. Ed-tech vendors are pretty goddamned cavalier when it comes to student privacy, as Linkletter knows well. Back in 2020, Linkletter was an ed-tech specialist for the University of British Columbia, where he was called upon to assess Proctorio, a "remote invigilation" tool that monitored remote students while they sat exams.
This is a nightmare category of software, a mix of high-tech phrenology (vendors claim that they can tell when students are cheating by using "AI" to analyze their faces); arrogant techno-sadism (vendors requires students – including those sharing one-room apartments with "essential worker" parents on night shifts who sleep during the day – to pan their cameras around to prove that they are alone); digital racism (products are so bad at recognizing Black faces that some students have had to sit exams with multiple task-lights shining directly onto their faces); and bullshit (vendors routinely lie about their tools' capabilities and efficacy).
Worst: remote invigilation is grounded in the pedagogically bankrupt idea that learning is best (or even plausibly) assessed through high-stakes testing. The kind of person who wants to use these tools generally has no idea how learning works and thinks of students as presumptively guilty cheats. They monitor test-taking students in realtime, and have been known to jiggle test-takers' cursors impatiently when students think too long about their answers. Remote invigilation also captures the eye-movements of test-takers, flagging people who look away from the screen while thinking for potential cheating. No wonder that many students who sit exams under these conditions find themselves so anxious that they vomit or experience diarrhea, carefully staring directly into the camera as they shit themselves or vomit down their shirts, lest they be penalized for looking away or visiting the toilet.
Linkletter quickly realized that Proctorio is a worst-in-class example of a dreadful category. The public-facing materials the company provided about its products were flatly contradicted by the materials they provided to educators, where all the really nasty stuff was buried. The company – whose business exploded during the covid lockdowns – is helmed by CEO Mike Olsen, a nasty piece of work who once doxed a child who criticized him in an online forum:
Proctorio's products are shrouded in secrecy. In 2020, for reasons never explained, all the (terrible, outraged) reviews of its browser plugin disappeared from the Chrome store:
Linkletter tweeted his alarming findings, publishing links to the unlisted, but publicly available Youtube videos where Proctorio explained how its products really worked. Proctorio then sued Linkletter, for copyright infringement.
Proctorio's argument is that by linking to materials that they published on Youtube with permissions that let anyone with the link see them, Linkletter infringed upon their copyright. When Linkletter discovered that these videos already had publicly available links, indexed by Google, in the documentation produced by other Proctorio customers for students and teachers, Proctorio doubled down and argued that by collecting these publicly available links to publicly available videos, Linkletter had still somehow infringed on their copyright.
Luckily for Linkletter, BC has an anti-SLAPP law that is supposed to protect whistleblowers facing legal retaliation for publishing protected speech related to matters of public interest (like whether BC's flagship university has bought a defective and harmful product that its students will be forced to use). Unluckily for Linkletter, the law is brand new, lacks jurisprudence, and the courts have decided that he can't use a SLAPP defense and his case must go to trial:
Linkletter could have let that experience frighten him away from the kind of principled advocacy that riles up deep-pocketed, thin-skinned bullies. Instead, he doubled down, founding the Canadian Privacy Library, with the goal of using Freedom of Information requests to catalog all of Canada's post-secondary institutions' privacy assessments. Given how many bodies he found buried in Proctorio's back yard, this feels like the kind of thing that should be made more visible to Canadians.
There are 25 public universities in BC, and Linkletter FOI'ed them all. Eleven provided their PIAs. Eight sent him an estimate of what it would cost them (and thus what they would charge) to assemble these docs for him. Six requested extensions.
One of them threatened to sue.
Langara College is a 19,000-student spinout of Vancouver Community College whose motto is Eruditio Libertas Est ("Knowledge is Freedom"). Linkletter got their 2019 PIA for Microsoft's Office 365 when he FOI'ed the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (universities often recycle one another's privacy impact assessments, which is fine).
That's where the trouble started. In June, Langara sent Linkletter a letter demanding that he remove their Office 365 PIA; the letter CC'ed two partners in a law firm, and accused Linkletter of copyright infringement. But that's not how copyright – or public records – work. As Linkletter writes, the PIA is "a public record lawfully obtained through an FOI request" – it is neither exempted from disclosure, nor is it confidential:
https://www.privacylibrary.ca/legal-threat/
Langara claims that in making their mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment for Office 365 available, Linkletter has exposed them to "heightened risks of data breaches and privacy incidents," they provided no evidence to support this assertion.
I think they're full of shit, but you don't have to take my word for it. After initially removing the PIA, Linkletter restored it, and you can read it for yourself:
I read it. It is pretty goddamned anodyne – about as exciting as looking at the roof of Barbra Streisand's mansion.
Sometimes, where there's smoke, there's only Streisand – a person who has foolishly decided to use the law to bully a weaker stranger out of disclosing some innocuous and publicly available fact about themselves. But sometimes, where there's smoke, there's fire. A lot of people who read my work are much more familiar with ed-tech, privacy, and pedagogy than I am. If that's you, maybe you want to peruse the Langara PIA to see if they are hiding something because they're exposing their students to privacy risks and don't want that fact to get out.
There are plenty of potential privacy risks in Office 365! The cloud version of Microsoft Office contains a "bossware" mode that allows bosses to monitor their workers' keystrokes for spelling, content, and accuracy, and produce neat charts of which employees are least "productive." The joke's on the boss, though: Office 365 also has a tool that lets you compare your department's usage of Office 365 to your competitors, which is another way of saying that Microsoft is gathering your trade secrets and handing it out to your direct competitors:
So, yeah, there are lots of "features" in Office 365 that could give rise to privacy threats when it is used at a university. One hopes that Langara correctly assessed these risks and accounted for them in its PIA, which would mean that they are bullying Linkletter out of reflex, rather than to cover up wrongdoing. But there's only one way to find out: go through the doc that Linkletter has restored to public view.
Linkletter has excellent pro bono representation from Norton Rose Fulbright, a large and powerful law-firm that is handling his Proctorio case. Linkletter writes, "they have put this public college on notice that any proceeding is liable to be dismissed pursuant to the Protection of Public Participation Act, BC’s anti-SLAPP legislation."
Langara has now found themselves at the bottom of a hole, and if they're smart, they'll stop digging.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I am writing to you regarding the events and promises made in the last several months, as a Canadian citizen I feel obligated to inform you of the undemocratic actions taking place on Parliament Hill. It has come to my attention that due to a new found interest in foreign trade and a massive wave of foreign investment Canada needs to open up to international partners to expand our economy. This concept however flawed, in the aspect of limitless growth, is completely reasonable and acceptable for the government to address. If this was simply the case of events this letter would be uncalled for; however what is unfolding in our government is far from tolerable and needs to be debated.
My correspondence is in rebuttal to the actions of the Canadian Government to ratify The Canada/China Foreign Investment Agreement or (FIPPA) as it more commonly referred to. As clearly seen in this agreement and as I know you are already aware of, there is an article of the partnership that could cripple Canadian sovereignty. This partnership like, The North American Free Trade Agreement, puts into question if the current conservative government is really protecting the interest of Canadians on an international level.
To paraphrase and to remind you of the dire content of this agreement, it is stated that our government will be subject to compromising influence of The Communist Party of China. Which in this situation, allows Chinese owned companies to sue The Canadian Government on the bases of profit margin. If a law is passed by the Canadian people this agreement could allow for a Chinese enterprises to sue for loss of profit. This is unacceptable not only is it neglecting the sovereignty of Canadian law, it gives an unfair competitive advantage to Chinese companies over Canadian businesses. As well FIPPA further states that future Canadian Governments would have to give 15 years notice before pulling out of this agreement.
As stated before this makes me question if The Canadian Government is really looking out for the interest of Canadians because this agreement seems to favour the needs of China before anything else. This agreement needs to be thoroughly debated and is in much need of amendments and revision. As I suspect that FIPPA will be ratified without any democratic process I want you to understand that I am holding The Conservative Government fully responsible for the outcomes associated. Because these outcomes compromise Canadian sovereignty I also believe that this issue will fall under the crime of treason which is described as, “a violation of allegiance to one's sovereign or to one's state”.
This describes every Member of Parliament that allows this partnership to be approved and in that circumstance I will be personally contacting the Governor General of Canada to register my criminal accusation.
I am begging you all. This is not okay. This is not a time for apathy. I know I didn't vote for this egomaniac, and I am 99% sure neither did all you Canadians here on Tumblr. We are running out of time, and only today did Mulcair finally speak up about this undemocratic, and unconstitutional "trade" agreement. Harper's Canada is not my Canada, and he needs to know this if any of you agree. Please.
I know I've not been posting a lot lately, but I figure this is worth a post for any of you who are Canadians (or not, and just care about the environment etc in general). Basically, Harper has set us up to become a Chinese colony for the 31 years, and there has been no debate about this trade agreement in the HOC. I am unsure why more people are not terrified/protesting this? So please, feel free to hop on over to here and sign a petition or two which already has more than 60,000 signatures demanding debate on this issue, as well as for further information.
The traitor Harper must be stopped. This isn't acceptable by any means.
