OTTAWA — The government says information collected by an online electoral reform consultation isn’t accessible to the Liberal Party, after an Ontario man alleged he started getting fundraising emails soon after completing the survey.
Sean Fullerton, a database analyst in Kitchener, Ont., told the National Post he unsubscribed from Liberal emails more than a year ago, but started receiving them again almost immediately after entering his email address on MyDemocracy.ca, a website being used to gather opinion on democratic values.
But both the government and Vox Pop Labs, the company that designed the site, deny email addresses are even being collected.
“Protecting personal information is something we take very seriously. Political parties have no access whatsoever to any information shared with MyDemocracy.ca. That is just not happening,” said John O’Leary, the director of communications for Democratic Institutions Minister Maryam Monsef.
“Emails are not retained in the system when results are emailed to users. They are not stored and cannot be retrieved by anyone, Vox Pop Labs included,” said Clifton van der Linden, the CEO and founder of the public opinion company, in an email. “The implication that these email addresses are stored or shared with third parties is utterly baseless.”
He added, “our organization would of course investigate any reports about the security of our system and integrity of our database, but we have not received such reports thus far.”
Fullerton, who works at an insurance company, explained Thursday he found it “really, really odd” when Liberal fundraising emails started pouring into his email account within a few hours of completing the electoral reform consultation Monday.
He said he rescinded his party membership in May 2015 — in protest after the Liberals voted in favour of a controversial anti-terror law, Bill C-51 — and stopped receiving fundraising asks after unsubscribing from email lists. “They just stopped,” he said. “As soon as I did that survey, I started getting them again.”
Based on his experience with managing databases, his best guess, he said, was that the system automatically linked the email he inputted to another database containing past party affiliates.
Fullerton insisted he didn’t engage in any other activity, or fill out any other forms, that could’ve caused him to start receiving emails again. That’s why he found it “suspicious.”
He plans to make a formal complaint against the Liberal Party for going against anti-spam legislation by sending him emails he doesn’t want to receive.
NDP MP Nathan Cullen wonders why email addresses are being asked for at all, along with other details such as age, income, level of education and postal codes.
Originally, the fine print on MyDemocracy.ca said survey entries that didn’t include those details wouldn’t be counted in results. But that text changed Thursday to say purely anonymous entries would be included in the overall, aggregate results — just not the results weighted to be more representative.
“They know a lot about you, with that much information,” Cullen said. “And there’s worries that this eventually turns into a Liberal fundraising list.” If the government was collecting data for partisan use, he said, “that would be one of the most unethical and cynical things imaginable.”
A spokesman for the Treasury Board Secretariat, which is responsible for government web policy, said Thursday government institutions are responsible for making sure contracts with third parties meet Privacy Act requirements. That includes not sharing personal information publicly or with other organizations, including political parties.
Personal information “is not generally collected in the course of a survey,” said Alain Belle-Isle, but when it is, “respondents would be informed of the protection of their personal information prior to collection.” In the case of MyDemocracy.ca, that information is available but participants must click into the “privacy policy” section of the site to find it.
The website itself is not registered to the government but to a domain name company called Go Daddy.
Canada’s privacy czar is looking into the electoral reform survey, but hasn’t said if and when a formal investigation will be conducted.
• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: amariedanielles
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