Privacy experts say police and government use of “extremely intrusive” spyware needs to be tightly controlled, and the technology should be outlawed for the general Canadian public.
Former privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien told the committee he was not aware the RCMP has been using what it calls “on-device investigative tools” for more than a decade.
“It was surprising that in the context of many, many debates in the public about the challenges of encryption (in policing), that when I was privacy commissioner I was not told that a tool was used to overcome encryption,” he said.
During his tenure between 2014 and 2022, Therrien called for Parliament to strengthen Canada’s privacy laws. In particular, he said privacy needs to be recognized as a fundamental human right under the law….