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From: jmlang@water.UUCP
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: Borrowed records from Revenue Canada
Message-ID: <623@water.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Nov-86 22:16:05 EST
Article-I.D.: water.623
Posted: Tue Nov 18 22:16:05 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Nov-86 06:42:40 EST
Distribution: can
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 29

I is very scary that somebody can "borrow" a few million
records containing personal data about people.  Reading
the papers, it is quite obvious that it would be very
easy to use the type of information contained in those
Revenue files.  In a way, it is a bit reassuring that the
records were on micro-fiches, there is quite a lot more
damage that could be done with the same records in electronic
format.

Have you noticed how many forms you have to fill that contain
the S.I.N., even though there are only 3 or 4 official use for
it : your employee record, your income taxe form and ...?
With such a Universal number, invasion of privacy by computer
matching is a definite possibility. Yet, there is little
awareness about that. Another problem happens when you give
out information for one use, and it ends up being used for other
means : an obvious example is when I subscribe to a magazine and
get put on dozen of mailing lists without my autorisation. 

Anyway, knowing that government files, or for that matter any
files containing personal information, can and will fall in
unintended hands, I'm am not sure what the safeguards should
be to minimise any damage. Anybody out there have any idea?


-- 
Je'ro^me M. Lang	   ||				    jmlang@water.uucp
Dept of Applied Math       ||			  jmlang%water@waterloo.csnet
U of Waterloo		   ||  	 jmlang%water%waterloo.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa