Judge rules cellphone ‘tower dumps’ violate charter right to privacy
An Ontario judge has accepted arguments by Rogers and Telus that police are violating Canadians' privacy by making sweeping requests for 'tower dump' records, showing all cellphone use by tens of thousands of mobile customers.
Ontario Superior Court justice says search warrants breached rights of Rogers and Telus customers.
Sweeping police search warrants forcing companies to turn over the cellphone records of thousands of innocent customers breach people’s privacy and violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, an Ontario Superior Court judge has ruled.
The decision released Thursday says Canadians’ mobile-phone records should in principle remain private. In the decision, Justice John Sproat lays out guidelines so that police may only obtain a minimal amount of information about cellphone users directly relevant to their investigation
Sproat was ruling in a case where police in Peel Region, west of Toronto, obtained a court order for the names, numbers, addresses and banking details of every mobile-phone user whose signals were bouncing off various cellphone towers during a series of jewelry-store robberies in early 2014.
Rogers and Telus challenged the court order as a breach of privacy that would have involved giving police information about more than 40,000 customers.
“I have no hesitation in finding that the Production Orders were overly broad and that they infringed section 8 (against unreasonable search and seizure) of the Charter,” wrote Sproat in the decision.
~cbc.ca
