Elections Canada collects personal info on teens too young to vote

[Nfld Sapper]

Hmm... no privacy?

Elections Canada collects personal info on teens too young to vote
Last Updated: Thursday, February 12, 2009 | 11:17 AM ET CBC News

Elections Canada has been collecting personal information about Canadians under 18, even though it has no authority to do so because they are too young to vote, says a new report from Canada's auditor general and privacy commissioner.

Elections Canada estimates that it currently holds identity information on about 104,000 Canadians under the age of 18, said the report tabled in the House of Commons Thursday.

However, the report found that for the most part, Elections Canada and three other institutions audited collect only the information they are authorized to collect.

The report was one of two prepared jointly by Auditor General Sheila Fraser and privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart to look at the practices of four government departments with databases "housing vast quantities of personal information" such as birthdates and addresses:

• Canada Revenue Agency
• Elections Canada
• Passport Canada
• Service Canada

The report found Elections Canada has information on some young Canadians because it gets data from provincial and territorial driver's licence registries.

In response to the findings of the audit, Elections Canada said it will purge its database of information of Canadians under 18 and will ask suppliers to provide only information about adults.

Data gathering incomplete or duplicated

Other findings of the report were that:

• Federal departments have no national framework that allows them work together in managing personal information. That has resulted in duplication, repeated consideration of the same problems and incomplete solutions to problems.
  
• Even though there have been electronic links between federal departments and provincial governments for 10 years, only some information is being collected electronically. That means some individual federal organizations have separate agreements with provinces and territories to obtain and pay for information about people who have died, and then sometimes exchange information with each other about the same people.

The privacy commissioner’s mandate is to oversee compliance with laws governing the handling of personal information by federal government departments and the private sector, while the auditor general’s mandate is to hold the federal government accountable for its spending of public funds.

 

[DBA]

While you can get a driver's license before being able to vote it won't be long before you are voting. Seems like a good idea to get names close to voting age.

Strangely one part of the article says:

Federal departments have no national framework that allows them work together in managing personal information. That has resulted in duplication, repeated consideration of the same problems and incomplete solutions to problems.

Odd thing to say since various Federal departments are prohibited from wholesale sharing of data by legislation. The driver of such restrictions is privacy and to prevent a large combined Federal database of Canadians.