No Charter-protected expectation of privacy in vehicle operation data

On July 20th, the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan held that an accused person who drove his pickup truck through a highway intersection and stuck a semi-truck did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy that precluded the police from seizing a control module and its data from his vehicle before it was towed away.

The accident was horrible. There were six people in the truck with the accused, three of whom died, two of whom were children. The police charged the accused with dangerous driving and criminal negligence, and the prosecution relied on evidence retrieved from the wrecked pickup truck at the scene of the accident. Specifically, the police seized the truck’s Airbag Control Module (ACM) from under the driver’s seat. The ACM contained an Event Data Recorder (EDR) with data about the vehicle’s operation during the five seconds before impact in tenth of a second intervals – specifically, speed, accelerator pedal (% full), manifold pressure and service brake (on/off), seatbelt pretensioner readings, airbag deployment readings.

There are competing lines of Canadian jurisprudence regarding the warrantless seizure of on board vehicle computers and their data. The leading Ontario case is Hamilton, a Ontario Superior Court of Justice case that recognizes a reasonable expectation of (informational) privacy. In Yogeswaran, though, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice held that the territorial privacy interest in one’s vehicle is enough to preclude police search and seizure without prior judicial authorization.

Conversely, in Fedan, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia held that one’s territorial privacy interest in their vehicle is extinguished when the vehicle is seized and that EDR data is not associated with a strong enough informational privacy interest to warrant Charter protection.

The Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan followed Fedan. It reasoned that the accused’s truck, being totally destroyed on the side of a public roadway, was in the total control of the police whether or not it was yet to be formally seized based on section 489(2) of the Criminal Code. It concluded:

…the claim to a territorial privacy interest by Mr. Major in that component of his vehicle is weak. While a warrant could have been obtained, that does not mean one was required. I find that the state of the vehicle, Mr. Major’s loss of control over it, the nature of the ACM as a mechanical safety component installed by the manufacturer, and the focused task by Cpl. Green in locating and removing only it, do not support the continued existence of an objectively reasonable territorial privacy interest at the point when the vehicle was entered

Regarding informational privacy, the Court made the point that not all digital evidence is equally sensitive or revealing of one’s “biographical core.” EDR data of the kind at issue is limited to data about the operation of a vehicle immediately before an accident, and provides no “longer-term information about the driving habits of the owner or operator of a vehicle.” The Court concluded:

After considering the two lines of cases regarding EDR data, I find myself in substantial agreement with the reasoning from Fedan for the characterization of the data stored in the EDR. As in Fedan, the data here “contained no intimate details of the driver’s biographical core, lifestyle or personal choices, or information that could be said to directly compromise his ‘dignity, integrity and autonomy’” (at para 82, quoting Plant at 293). It revealed no personal identifiers or details at all. It was not invasive of Mr. Major’s personal life. The anonymous driving data disclosed virtually nothing about the lifestyle or private decisions of the operator of the Dodge Ram pickup. It is hard to conceive that Mr. Major intended to keep his manner of driving private, given that the other occupants of the vehicle – which included an adult employee – and complete strangers, who were contemporaneously using the public roadways or adjacent to it, could readily observe him. His highly regulated driving behaviour was “exposed to the public” (Tessling at para 47), although not to the precise degree with which the limited EDR data, as interpreted by the Bosch CDR software, purports to do. While it is only a small point, I further observe that a police officer on traffic patrol would have been entitled to capture Mr. Major’s precise speed on their speed detection equipment without raising any privacy concerns.

R v Major, 2022 SKCA 80 (CanLII).

Appellate court’s decision on teachers’ privacy rights in Ontario

I’ve stuck my neck out in the BLG Insights article linked below in saying that the Court of Appeal for Ontario got a recent school search case wrong. Privacy claims are unpredictable, and can hook on ideas held by decision-makers in a way that impedes common sense outcomes. This is one of those cases in my view, and does harm to security and safety on a number of levels.

Practically, Ontario organizations ought to be addressing the very subject matter of this case in preparation for an October legislative change that will require workplace monitoring policies. The new legislation doesn’t change the right to “monitor,” but organizations shouldn’t view their policies as neutral. Rather, advocacy in support of several essential organizational interests should be embedded in that policy so clear need for balance is established from the start.

https://www.blg.com/en/insights/2022/07/appellate-courts-decision-on-teachers-privacy-rights-in-ontario

Man CA – Police can identify driver of rental car via agency

On April 15th, the Court of Appeal for Manitoba held that an accused had no reasonable expectation of privacy in information that a rental car agency provided to the police without a warrant.

The police were investigating a fatal shooting. The shooter was in a rental car that belonged to a specific agency, they knew. When the police asked, the agency identified the co-accused as the renter and the accused as an authorized driver. It also provided their cell phone numbers, drivers license numbers and credit card numbers.

The Supreme Court of Canada decision in Spencer dictates that the PIPEDA allowance for volunteering information to the police does not vitiate one’s expectation of privacy for the purpose of Charter analysis. The Court of Appeal acknowledged this, and as in Spencer, it also held that contract language allowing for the disclosure of personal information as “required or permitted by law” was “of no real assistance.”

However, the Court of Appeal distinguished Spencer on other grounds. Its decision turns on the following key factors:

the rental agreement allowed the agency share information with law enforcement “to take action regarding illegal activities or violations of terms of service”
section 22 of the Manitoba Highway Traffic Act requires agencies to keep a registry of renters that is open to public inspection (even though the registry is to include “particular’s of the [renter’s] drivers license”)
the overall context – i.e., that driving is a highly regulated activity, with one’s identity as an operator of a vehicle being something that is widely known and ought to be widely knowable

Privacy advocates will take issue with the Court’s reliance on the rental agreement term, though the case does rest on two other significant factors, including a provision of Manitoba law that the accused did not challenge. On a quick look, I see that Saskatchewan has the same provision.

R v Telfer, 2021 MBCA 38 (CanLII).

PEICA finds no “search” in interviewing a hacker informant

The headline is sensational, but it aptly describes the issue that the Prince Edward Island Court of Appeal recently addressed in R v Molyneaux. The Court held that the police did not conduct a search (governed by section 8 of the Charter) by interviewing an informant about what she saw when she surreptitiously viewed the accused’s phone.

The police charged the accused with child pornography offences. There was a separate dispute about the seizure of images from the accused’s phone, but the Court of Appeal dealt with the informant’s statement alone. The informant attended the police station for an interview, and told the police that she had viewed numerous pornographic pictures of her child when browsing the accused’s phone. The defence argued that the police conducted a search into the phone by conducting this interview. It relied, in part, on cases that have precluded the police from obtaining private information from commercial actors – namely, R. v. Spencer, 2014 SCC 43 and R. v. Orlandis-Habsburgo, 2017 ONCA 649.

The Court rejected the defence argument, explaining:

Society’s conception of the proper relationship between the investigative branches of the state and the individual surely must allow the police to speak to a witness without prior judicial authorization.

I do not believe that the subject matter of the “search” was Molyneaux’s cell phone or the contents thereof. The police were seeking information that might reveal whether or not a crime occurred, and if so, whether or not they should pursue further investigation. The subject of the search was K.’s memory of what she saw the morning of December 31, 2017.

The Court distinguished Spencer and Orlandis-Habsburgo as matters arising out of the commercial context, in which expectations differ.

R v Molyneaux, 2020 PECA 2 (CanLII).

Ont CA – reasonable expectation of privacy turns on potential for secondary use

The Court of Appeal for Ontario issued a judgement yesterday that highlights the potential for secondary use of collected data as a factor that weighs in favour of privacy protection.

The police swabbed the door handle of a car that was parked in public to test for cocaine residue. The Court found a reasonable expectation of privacy that rendered the search – which was done without judicial authorization – unlawful.

While holding that physical contact with the car was “a factor,” the Court de-emphasized the significance of physical contact with a chattel:

Too narrow a focus on whether there was a trespass to a chattel, and the extent of interference with use of that chattel, could obscure the privacy interests at stake, as here, where the trial judge focused on the fact that the taking of the swabs had no impact on the appellant’s use of the car and was not known to him.

Compare this to the United States Supreme Court finding in United States v Jones, in which a majority held that the trespass committed by police who install a GPS tracking device on a vehicle is the trigger to constitutional privacy protection.

The Court of Appeal for Ontario’s analysis rested more heavily on the potential for using the swab sample for purposes more intrusive than testing for cocaine residue:

These swabs presumably revealed whether the appellant had handled cocaine. I also agree with the observations in Wong, at para. 27, that privacy concerns are heightened because the swabs may also provide DNA samples for analysis by police, even if that is not why they were initially collected, or what they were used for. Patrick concerned police searches of a suspect’s curb-side garbage. Though the police were searching for evidence of drug offences, the potential for collection of DNA was also relevant to the privacy analysis: see para. 30. The court also expressed scepticism of the notion that privacy concerns are diminished because the search was targeted at contraband: see Patrick, at para. 32; see also A.M., at para. 73.

Search methodologies can be so targeted as to become defensible. The Supreme Court of Canada’s Tessling case, for example, suggests that capturing a heat signature emanating from a residence is unobtrusive because it reveals criminal activity in the house – an illegal grow op – and not much else. The majority in Tessling expressly said that a search should not be judged based on “theoretical” secondary uses. In this case, the potential for secondary use was real.

Hat tip to Fred Schumann of Stockwoods.

R. v. Wawrykiewycz, 2020 ONCA 269.

Arbitrator declines to find a privacy violation for inquiry made of employee’s second employer

As the gig economy rises, work for more than one employer is becoming more common, and work across multiple employers has been common in the health care sector for some time. What, then, is an employer to do if its employee has taken sick leave but may be working for their other employer? Can the employer simply ask the other employer if the employee is at work?

There are some discipline cases in which unions have not challenged such questioning and others in which employers have asked for employee consent to make the inquiry. Last July, Arbitrator Brian Sheehan of Ontario entertained and dismissed what I believe to be the first privacy breach allegation on point, though he did so in quite a qualified manner.

The employer’s inquiry was apparently based on a mere suspicion. Mr. Sheehan explained, “For Ms. Valentin, the grievor’s relatively significant level of absenteeism, in addition to Ms. Valentin’s perception that there was a pattern of the grievor being absent from work on days before or after her scheduled days off was suspicious.”

To aggravate the situation, when the employer called the other workplace it received the information it was seeking plus some editorial – that the grievor’s “attitude stinks.”

Mr. Sheehan nonetheless declined to find a privacy breach. He said:

As to the Union’s privacy argument, factually, I do not find that claim particularly compelling. Based on the Employer’s understanding of the facts as of September 2014, it had, in my view, a reasonable basis to investigate the grievor’s work history at Villa Leonardo. The Union’s primary complaint was that the Employer should have initially sought to obtain the information from the grievor. On this point, while as previously noted the grievor was fairly forthcoming with respect to her work history at Villa Leonardo, she was in fact mistaken as to her work history in relation to some of the days in question. At the same time, the Employer arguably should have followed the approach in the Province of Alberta, supra, case and sought the grievor’s consent to obtain the relevant documentation from Villa Leonardo.

At the end the day, however, the extent of the nature of the invasion of the grievor’s privacy relates to the Employer asking a third party the work history pertaining to the grievor. Seeking such information is definitively on the lower end of the spectrum of the privacy interests of an individual that warrant protection, and that interest is far removed from the surreptitious electronic surveillance that was in dispute in the cited Domain Forest Products, supra, and Ebco Metal Finishing Ltd., supra, cases. In this regard, any breach of the grievor’s privacy interest was, in my view, de minimis in nature; such that, I am not inclined to issue any sort of declaration or sanction.

This is best understood as a discouragement to employers, without an actual finding based on an application of the de minimis non curat lex principle: the law will not concern itself with trifles.

No arbitrator is bound to follow another arbitrator, but employers can take some comfort in this award. If they have a reason not to ask for consent (and are prepared to articulate it if challenged) they may decide to unilaterally seek information from another employer about whether an employee was or was not at work during a period of time. The risk of liability is low.

Toronto (City) v Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 79, 2019 CanLII 78856 (ON LA).

NSCA says no expectation of privacy in address information

On January 28th the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal dismissed a privacy breach allegation that was based on a municipality’s admitted disclosure of address information to a related service commission so the service commission could bill for certain statutorily mandated charges. The Court held there was no reasonable expectation of privacy in the information disclosed, reasoning as follows:

Mr. Banfield’s information was not confidential, secret or anonymous. Neither did it offer a glimpse into Mr. Banfield’s intimate, personal or sensitive activities. Nor did it involve the investigation of a potential offence. Rather, it enabled a regulated public utility to invoice Mr. Banfield with rates approved under statutory authority for a legally authorized service that, in fact, Mr. Banfield received.

Banfield v. Nova Scotia (Utility and Review Board), 2020 NSCA 6 (CanLII).

Notable snippet about the personal information concept in recent Ont CA search case

On January 13th, the Court of Appeal for Ontario held that a convicted appellant did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in “what could be seen and heard on [his] property from his neighbour’s [property].”

The police trespassed on an neighbour’s rural property to conduct surveillance, and they heard gunshots and saw two individuals with rifles outside of the appellant’s house. Based on these observations, the police obtained a warrant to search the appellant’s house. They ultimately secured one or more convictions on drug and weapons charges.

The Court held, that in the context, it did not matter that the police were trespassing. (The gunshots were loud, and the appellant’s property was abutted by a public road in any event.) It also held that the police did not obtain “personal information,” reasoning as follows:

What triggered the application for the first warrant was the sound of the discharge of a firearm – something that could scarcely be concealed – coupled with visual observations of persons outdoors either firing a rifle or holding a rifle. These were bare observations of physical acts. There was no personal information obtained.

This illustrates how the personal information concept is not as simple, and perhaps not as broad, as one might think. The facts observed clearly allowed the police to infer what was in the house and obtain, on the reasonable and probable grounds standard, a search warrant. Nonetheless, the Court held that the observations did not invite a collection of personal information.

R v Roy, 2020 ONCA 18 (CanLII).

ONSC affirms damages award for “friend’s” leak of work schedule

On April 8th, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice affirmed a $1,500 damages award for a privacy breach that entailed the disclosure of information that the defendant received because she was the plaintiff’s social media friend.

The plaintiff and defendant were pilots who worked for the same airline. The plaintiff shared his work schedule with the defendant though an application that allowed him to share his information with “friends” for the purpose of mitigating the demands of travel. The airline also maintained a website that made similar information available to employees. The defendant obtained the schedule information through one or both of these sites and shared it with the plaintiff’s estranged wife.

There are a number of good issues embedded in this scenario. Is a work schedule, in this context, personal information? Does one have an expectation of privacy in information shared in this context? Does the intrusion upon seclusion tort proscribe a disclosure of personal information?

The appeal judgement is rather bottom line. In finding the plaintiff had a protectable privacy interest, the Court drew significance from the airline’s employee privacy policy. It said:

The policy of Air Canada, that must be followed by all employees, emphasises the privacy rights of the employees. This policy specifically prohibits any employee from disseminating personal information of another employee to third parties without express permission of the other employee. The sharing of personal information between employees is clearly restricted for work related purposes only. Permission to review and obtain this information is not given unless it is for work related purposes. If the information is reviewed and used for any other purpose, this results in conduct that constitutes an intentional invasion of the private affairs or concerns. In addition, I find that a reasonable person would regard this type of invasion of privacy as highly offensive and causing distress, humiliation and anguish to the person.

The defendant did not appeal the $1,500 damages award.

John Stevens v Glennis Walsh, 2016 ONSC 2418 (CanLII).

BCCA affirms its position on text message privacy

On April 11th, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia held that a defendant convicted of internet luring and sexual touching of a minor had a reasonable expectation of privacy in direct messages he sent to the complainant and others via a social media platform.

The trial judge had found no such expectation – a finding that rested in part on the nature of the messages. The trial judge held that the messages contained no personal information that the defendant had not posted in his public profile and were not sent to an intimate, trustworthy contact. The Court of Appeal viewed the messages differently – as “flirtatious” – and held that the trial judge rested too heavily on the “risk analysis” that characterizes American Fourth Amendment law. It reasoned:

While recognizing that electronic surveillance is a particularly serious invasion of privacy, the reasoning is of assistance in this case. Millions, if not billions, of emails and “messages” are sent and received each day all over the world. Email has become the primary method of communication. When an email is sent, one knows it can be forwarded with ease, printed and circulated, or given to the authorities by the recipient. But it does not follow, in my view, that the sender is deprived of all reasonable expectation of privacy. I will discuss this further below. To find that is the case would permit the authorities to seize emails, without prior judicial authorization, from recipients to investigate crime or simply satisfy their curiosity. In my view, the analogy between seizing emails and surreptitious recordings [as considered by the Supreme Court of Canada in R v Duarte] is valid to this extent.

In then end, the Court found a breach of section 8 but held the evidence was admissible after conducting its section 24(2) analysis.

The Court’s reasonable expectation of privacy finding follows its earlier similar finding in R v Peluco. For the context see this Law Times article.

R v Craig, 2016 BCCA 154 (CanLII).