In Canada, for most of the 20th century until maybe 15 years ago, your PII was in a big book that lived at everybody's house and the library unless you specifically opted out.

When did you last try with the OPC? I also have experience (a few) and noted a sharp decline post covid. My first go was for Freedom Mobile (success) but the representative from the OPC was borderline harassing me to accept the currently (STILL) completely broken authentication. When I tried again it was 'out of jurisdiction' and no sort of appeal process.

Calling it functional is not something I would do. Judges are also extremely critical of the compensation process a have essentially been forced to take it over. It's also still too new and risky so lawyers are reluctant unless it's paid up front.

If anyone with any say is reading this, I can still break into any Freedom Mobile account in under a minute, including the admin ones.

> You have an entire country where institutions operate under the expectation that personally identifiable information isn't easily available like this

I actually look like this as the opposite—SSNs, emails, phone numbers, and credit card numbers are more or less public, or at least relatively easy to guess, buy, or find online, and addresses are quite easy to find if you don't hide behind an LLC. I treat all as if they're public information and I assume our institutions do as well.

My understanding is that voter registration data is a matter of public record in most (all?) states so the idea that it wouldn’t be a matter of public record north of the border is itself odd to me.

Sounds like an "active measures" operation.

Isn't the worst case scenario here, "Alberta has to vote on whether to secede"?

The Mercor leak last week or so of ids paired with audio recordings did make for the perfect voiceprint db. I'm sure it won't be the last of its kind..

It's mentioned explicitly in the article:

"Elections Alberta salts the electors’ lists with the names of fake voters, so if one copy of a list is leaked, the agency can trace its origins. An analysis determined the list came from the Republican Party of Alberta, headed by Cam Davies, who, like Parker, has a well-documented history in Alberta as a political operative who pushes boundaries."

" reminds me of mapmakers including fake towns or other features in their maps, in case someone leaked them."

Sounds the same to me, but are you sure they are doing it like this, or you guess?

It appears that they registered as a party to get access to the data and them disseminated it publicly through a vibecoded app.

While this data may generally be public in the US, it usually isn't in Canada, and there's an expectation that parties don't publish the data and it is seeded to detect that.

A bigger problem is that people in Canada sign up for this list with the expectation that this data will remain reasonably private so now with this leak you have people who were willing to share their personal information to participate in the democratic process now afraid that their domestic abusers will be able to find them.[0] That really sucks.

There's also the awkward aspect of this in that the Alberta separatists are seemingly backed by American interests.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...

Why are candidates allowed to spam voters in the US?

I'm a poll worker at the Alberta elections, and this isn't quite as cataclysmic as it sounds. Even without this leak, there are tens of thousands of poll workers, and it's really easy to become a poll workers, so most people who need to keep their address a secret either use a post office box for their registration, or don't register to vote at all (since you can vote without registering in Canada [0]).

That being said, it's pretty easy to get registered accidentally (I believe that the tax agency and the driver's licence agency both register you unless you opt out [1]), so this is still fairly bad.

[0]: Well, technically you must register to vote in Canada, but you can always register at the ballot box, and there's a checkbox that lets you opt-out of saving your information in the database (meaning that you'd need to reregister every time you vote).

[1]: You can use a post office box on both your taxes and your driver's licence, so that's usually the best solution to avoid getting accidentally registered with your real address.

"An Edmonton city councillor says he and his team are helping a woman facing intimate partner violence relocate with her children after her address was leaked in an alleged privacy breach by a separatist group."

From what I've seen it appears that it was intentional in that their motivation was to give their canvassers for the separatism petition access to the data so that they could pad their numbers for the petition.[0]

They didn't mean for this to blow up in the public like this though. That part wasn't intentional. That part appears to be absolute incompetence or they just got sloppy after being treated with kid gloves by law enforcement for the past few years.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/JDltJg7

The whole thing is really suspicious. If you dig deeper on the Centurion Project, things start to get weird. The Centurion Project website has little to no information, archives of the site go back to just over a month ago, and the address and phone number are for a random UPS Store in Calgary.

I got really suspicious when I started looking into Parker himself. He spews the typical "right wing" rhetoric -- Globalists bad, COVID fake etc etc... but if he actually believes that, what was he doing on the board of directors for Ditchley, which contains various ambassadors to China and France, Editor in Chief of the Globe and Mail, CEO of Desjardins, etc?

https://web.archive.org/web/20230313213623/https://www.ditch...

As far as I know Canada uses paper ballots and count the votes in front of witnesses at polling places. I doubt you can sabotage the system by just meddling electronic records.

It doesn't work that way -- it's not an open DB endpoint with misconfigured permissions, or something like that.

Up here there is a custom of sharing essentially a dump of the elector's table with every political party in the early days of an election.

This dump is seeded with some fake data before being released to a single political party, so if said party gets up to shenanigans, we know about it. These of course do nothing to prevent privacy violations, only to detect and punish them after the fact.

Personally I think this is a dated system from a bygone era, as there is obvious risk of permanent harm via election fraud in an environment where politics actors are highly motivated. If you believe Canada is an evil woke empire from which you must protect your sons, you will likely not care about Canadian electoral law.

Electorate data should be maintained by the political parties themselves, and guarded like nukes. New political parties should put in the hoofwork to build their own damn lists.

This is not publicly available information in Canada. One very real concern here is that domestic abusers will now be able to find their victims: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/edmonton-city-counci...

The people who've opted out of the phone book for reasons like "stalkers", etc., would probably be pretty upset with this, even if they're "few people"

At least in Germany, you'd have to opt in to your name and address being included in the phone book. So no, it's not remotely close to getting your personal details leaked publicly.

This is why rats are illegal in Alberta. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_control_in_Alberta

In the UK it's semi-public. The full register is available to politicians and credit reference agencies. You can inspect the register by attending in person at your local council office. You don't get a copy.

There's also the edited register, which anybody can buy a copy of. You only appear in this list if you opt-in when you register. I don't know why anybody does.

Yeah, it almost sounds like the leaked information was... effectively the white pages for the area. ie name, address, and phone number

> Other Canadians eat up negative Alberta news like nothing else, and the media will no doubt provide them with the type of news that they crave.

The reality is more the complete opposite. People from not-Alberta care about their own provincial governments and issues and don't really think about Alberta at all.

It's the media and government in Alberta that is encouraging this notion that "Alberta is under attack" from others because lazy grievance politics works and it's a good distraction from scrutiny on the failings of the Albertan provincial government. You see the government of Quebec do the same thing, blaming Rest of Canada for all their woes, wrapping themselves up in the provincial flag, etc etc.

Don't fall for this stuff.

Smith was friendly with Parker.

Attended his wedding, did softball interviews with his wife who worked for a right wing media site.

I think that's a fair take for most people in the leak, but there are people who try to keep their address a secret for their safety (investigative journalists, witnesses of crimes, judges, lawyers, police officers, etc). They often have a PO box for situations when they have to enter an address (online purchases) or they buy everything in their partner's name (including their house). When their names are leaked elsewhere, their home address is not usually in those leaks. This is a unique type of leak that could be very harmful.