Victoria’s bars and nightclubs have stopped scanning IDs and collecting patrons’ personal information using TreoScope’s controversial EnterSafe surveillance technology.
The move comes after B.C. Information and Privacy Commissioner David Loukidelis ordered the Vancouver club, Wild Coyote, to stop scanning IDs, stop collecting patrons’ personal information and ensure that any such information in TreoScope’s database is destroyed.
TreoScope’s EnterSafe system creates a digital profile of patrons by recording their name, photograph, date of birth and ID serial number. Patrons’ personal information is sent encrypted over the Internet to TreoScope’s database in Vancouver.
“[Under B.C.’s Personal Information Protection Act,] Wild Coyote cannot require an individual to consent to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information … through the TreoScope software … as a condition of supplying a product or service,” Loukidelis ruled in his decision. “There was no persuasive evidence presented to me which demonstrated that such a requirement would have any significant effect on customer safety.”
Loukidelis’s order is similar to one in 2006 by Alberta’s privacy commissioner, which was upheld by Alberta’s Court of Queen’s Bench.
B.C. Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) Policy Director Micheal Vonn was pleased with Loukidelis’s order.
“We have two Canadian privacy commissioners, now, who have found this particular program, that scans the very sensitive information in one’s driver’s license and stores it in a third-party database, to be disproportionate to the purported benefits,” Vonn said.
Loukidelis said the benefits have not been significant.
“There is no objective evidence that persuasively demonstrates any actual decline in gang-related violence as a result of utilizing the TreoScope system,” Loukidelis said in his order.
However, he added that he understands the need to quell gang violence, and wants to work constructively with bar and nightclub owners.
According to Victoria Bar and Cabaret Association spokesman Scott Gurney, stakeholders are working together on a solution so that all needs, including those of the privacy commissioner’s office, are met.
For now, Gurney thinks that concerns about TreoScope are unnecessarily exaggerated.
“I think [the situation] has been way overblown, and it’s only because the public’s not educated,” Gurney said. “The ultimate goal is public safety. And that’s what’s really being shrouded right now with this whole privacy concern … There’s no secondary interest here for soliciting information.”
According to TreoScope’s website, loyal customers, or big spenders, may be noted as such in a venue’s EnterSafe system. As well, TreoScope EnterSafe clients can purchase reports that deliver insights into the makeup and behaviour of their customers.
“There’s a whole range of different questions that need to be asked about how the technology is going to be applied and used in individual contexts,” said Colin Bennett, a UVic Political Science professor and privacy advocate. “There are enough examples from other systems to know that … rogue employees browse around databases and find out personal information that they have no business knowing.”
Victoria Police Department Sgt. Grant Hamilton has downplayed privacy concerns about TreoScope.
“You return an item of clothing and they ask for your name, your address, your phone number, right? And you willingly provide that to return the item,” Hamilton said.
However, the Personal Information Protection Act explicitly distinguishes collecting personal information to prevent fraudulent refunds from collecting personal information as a condition of providing a product or service.
Hamilton also compared the information bars collect to what people are willing share on the Internet.
“[People who go to nightclubs] are all mostly younger people who are on Facebook, and most of those people will have [about] five hundred friends that they tell much more information to than would ever be captured in that [TreoScope] system,” Hamilton said.
However, Hamilton did express support for Loukidelis’s ruling.
“We are working with the privacy commissioner to make sure we comply with his concerns,” Hamilton said.
Gurney continues to support the use of TreoScope’s EnterSafe.
“What I would like to see happen is to have an ID scanning system in place that collects enough information that if someone decides to come in and engage in criminal behaviour, we can track them down, charge them, convict them and be rid of them from the public … if you want to live a private life in anonymity, then go live in the woods,” Gurney said.
Vonn, however, disagrees.
“The paradigm that has to be attacked here is that we need to keep track of everybody in case somebody makes a wrong move… which completely inverts the presumption of innocence,” she said. “It is simply not enough for the commercial interests who stand to benefit from this, and the police (who generally are all in favour of surveillance that might land in their data coffers) to purport that security and surveillance are synonymous — they are not.”