Update: Rogers and TELUS will no longer share customer information without a court order

Following a Supreme Court decision last month, Rogers has made revisions to its policy regarding the sharing of customer information with law enforcement agencies. Upholding Canadians’ rights to online privacy, the Supreme Court ruled in June that police will now require judicial authorization before asking Internet providers for information identifying their customers.

After reviewing the ruling Rogers, has modified its policy to restrict information sharing, and will no longer share such information without “lawful authority”, such as a court order or warrant, except in cases of life-saving emergency.

However, according to Ken Engelhart, Rogers’ VP of regulatory affairs, the policy change was not an automatic decision.

“It’s not 100 per cent clear, but that’s how it reads to me. [The court is] saying, ‘No production order, no name and address,’” he said in an interview. “Secondly, there’s been a huge amount of interest about this and our customers are saying to us ‘Why aren’t you doing everything you can to protect my information?’ And so those two factors led to this decision.”

Engelhart also said that Rogers received about 88,000 customer name/address requests in 2013, so the policy change is more than a formality. This is also not the first time the Supreme Court has sided with the privacy rights of mobile phone users. If you’ll remember, Telus was able to win an appeal preventing law enforcement from intercepting its customers text messages without a wiretap order.

Update: TELUS has also spoken up and decided that they will not give basic customer info to police without first seeing a warrant. In a statement, TELUS said, “Protecting our customers’ privacy is vitally important to Telus, and we have a long-standing practice of only providing confidential customer information to third parties pursuant to valid court orders or other applicable law.”

[source]The Globe and Mail[/source]