Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the committee.
The Crime Prevention Association has been working with consumers and with government at various levels for over 30 years. We look upon our duties as mainly protecting the interests of individuals and the public. We do work a great deal with corporations and the private sector, but it's mainly on working with consumer groups and with individuals who have come into contact with people who perhaps may have stolen their identity or used their identity, or with whom they are concerned that their identity might be at risk.
Just to give you an overview, this is our third year coming up for working with the Competition Bureau and with a group in Toronto, with the Toronto Police Services Board, on fraud and related issues.
On March 20 we have an annual day called change your PIN day. We use this as a spring into action to get people to think about changing their PIN, their personal identification number. This is a very difficult thing for people to actually do because everybody has it memorized as their dog's name or their mother's birthday or their grandmother's year of birth. So we suggest each year that people put the year after it, for instance if it was 1886 you would use 18865 for this year. It's a very popular thing and it has been picked up by other crime prevention related groups across the country. We're very proud of ourselves to have become involved with that and provided a way for people to think about their identity.
As I said, we also work with the Competition Bureau. We participate with the federal group each year.
We've worked with New Horizons for Seniors, where we've done workshops for both new immigrants and seniors. As we've progressed, we've also done those kinds of workshops with the Ontario government, working with new immigrant and youth groups to help them understand about credit and identity fraud and the various risks in Canada.
We've worked with the Royal Bank and also with Scotiabank, which sponsored the ABCs of Fraud for a number of years and provided funding across Canada for that group, which in 2011 lost its funding. We've been doing it as a volunteer group for the last four years.
We work with a number of people on things like romance scams, mortgage frauds, condo purchases, and fake marriages. On the same day that I received the invitation to come to this group, I received an e-mail from a lady. In a growing number of cases we're looking at job-related scams and fraudulent use of information and identity. The lady sent me an e-mail, which I will share with the committee. She had put in a job application for a Service Canada position, which as a government position any information sent for this should be going strictly through the government. What happened is that she received an e-mail back from a group that is actually a travel agency, which arranges religious pilgrimages. They were requesting that she provide references and a police record check. The lady in question sent me an e-mail asking what our opinion was on this. I told her we would be forwarding the information to the RCMP on her behalf with her permission, because this is the type of information that can in a growing way be used, not necessarily financially against this woman, but her identity perhaps could be used to create an identity for someone who could be involved in terrorist activities.
A number of issues are arising even among the consumer industry where people's identity can be used without their knowing it. The more we look at it, where information is sent by e-mail on growing unemployment issues, we can see it's very easy for someone to take that information and create a fake identity.
In a number of cases they have the social security number. They have the whole history of where the person has lived, where they got their education, every job they've had. In this case, when someone is requesting information from them—references and a police record check—this degree of information provides people an opportunity to create a very good profile, and to commit not only financial fraud with their information but also perhaps something far more nefarious when we look at other issues.
In Ontario, CPAT worked with the Privacy Commissioner to find out what information we could provide to consumers about protecting their identity and how we could relay to them that there is a risk with big data and with the way data is being mined by corporations and perhaps government, so that consumers could be aware that, when they are asked for information beyond biographical details or beyond a level they are confident in giving, they can ask what they should be giving and where this information is going to be used.
From our perspective, perhaps consumers should be warned when financial institutions, for instance, in a criminal fashion under-report breaches or thefts of data on credit cards or debit cards. Such under-reporting does not give us an opportunity to have our policing beefed up and perhaps to hire more people in police services or government services to look at these issues. We've looked at a number of these issues with regard to trying to protect consumers whose trust in our ability to protect them and their information is being eroded. People whose trust is eroded do not feel that their interests are being properly met by government services or other service providers, and, in the case of this lady who sent me the e-mail about her information, even when they go to apply for a job.
One of the other aspects, certainly, is the retail industry's mining of data to find information in order to, for instance, send you a pair of shoes, which you then have to send back. You're being caught up in what we used to see many years ago with book clubs. You're being sent all of these products, because you have opted for one type of service and you are being exposed to and perhaps charged for a lot of other services you aren't aware you're also opting in for.
I belong to several different groups that look at data. Today I received a request from a group to evaluate a program that a research company will offer to schools. The program will ask teachers or school boards to track activity among children. This information, in my opinion, will also be used by insurance companies or financial institutions or health IMOs to track whether people will be eligible for health-related products in the future. If you take somebody in grade 1 or kindergarten and you're tracking their physical health activity through until grade 12 with this type of new app, then an IMO 20 years from now could say, “Well, you didn't participate in enough sports, so you're not going to be eligible for a diabetes program”.
So, if we are looking at it now, there are a number of issues beyond identity theft that become identity usage. With regard to privacy, big data collection, and the use of data, we have an opportunity at this point in our history and development to perhaps create a robust risk assessment for consumers.
That's it. Thank you.