Spyware being used by 13 federal departments | Hacker News Reader

Spyware being used by 13 federal departments

cbc.ca

40 pointscolinprince9 comments

I've seen the office of the Privacy Commissioner show up in the news a few times. I think the last time was the Tim Horton's app that was silently logging as much info as possible.

Are they capable of doing anything? I've seen many reports, but nothing ever seems to be followed up.

> "[...] each federal institution is responsible for enforcing privacy laws and policies."

That seems to imply they aren't given any power at all, even within the government.

So how many federal departments there are left? I love that especially the Fisheries and Oceans has a urgent need to spy.

I love how the MoE is essentially claiming that they're using spyware to save the environment!

Every day I hate our government a little more.

I'm not a Canadian, but don't they have law enforcement and coast guard responsibilities? It seems to make sense that if they were to pull over some human traffickers or something, that they'd need some forensic tools.

This is on machines given to employees yeah?

It's both that (which is reasonable) and on/against the general public (which is not).

Really? The article didn’t give any details or I missed it. Is there more details I can read of how it’s used against the public?

Also, way too many people seemed to take the position of “oh it’s a company laptop so of course spyware is allowed”. It’s kinda gross how that’s accepted as “ok” - like if the company buys me a video camera or television for work that I can take home, it’s not ok if that fixed function appliance is reporting everything back to HQ. But for general purpose computing we’ve kind of accepted this breach of privacy without question. It’s really quite shocking (and no - it’s not a cybersecurity best practice to have spyware running on your employees devices).

If that’s the case, and it seems like it is, this is a ridiculous portrayal of what amounts to basic cybersecurity best practices for any organization.

Every single Fortune 500 company does this by deploying agents to all endpoints that monitor activity for suspicious activity.

Yeah, the reaction here is as though the forestry department can just pull up texts/phone logs from random citizens - but if this is just for their own staff, it's a bit of a nothing burger.

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