RightsCon Toronto 2018

Cell phones are increasingly becoming ubiquitous tools for participating in contemporary societies around the globe. We use them to communicate by voice, and increasingly by text. They help us keep information at our fingertips, including intimate details about our relationships, activities, and transactions. They help us navigate our physical environment with mapping tools and GPS. And in the process, they create a treasure-trove of personal information about us and those we are connected to, while facilitating real-time and after the fact tracking and surveillance of our movements, online and off.

But while both the technology and social norms are developing rapidly, the laws that protect our privacy in relation to cell phones are not. Courts are increasingly struggling with cases that involve privacy not just in the personal information we store on the phones, but also the information about us that the phones collect and transmit by virtue of the way they are designed and the infrastructures they must interact with to function. In Canada, the Supreme Court recently ruled in the combined cases of R. v. Marakah and R. v. Jones, establishing some privacy rights in text messages once they are sent. In the US, Carpenter v. the United States is before the U.S. Supreme Court, looking at whether police should be able to obtain detailed tracking information, collected routinely by service providers, without a warrant. On both sides of the Canadian/US border, warrantless searches by border officers are being challenged on constitutional grounds.

This public roundtable session will engage a mix of legal professionals, activists and advocates, and technologists in a guided discussion about the legal issues, ways to engage in the kinds of advocacy that might help shape privacy protective outcomes, and ways that technology can help solve the problems it has created. We will begin with experts providing brief summaries of key cases and issues to launch a wide-ranging and interactive discussion with the goals of identifying core issues shared by (or debated among) legal, policy, and technology sector participants. We hope to create a new, cross-border shared understanding of commonalities and differences in current approaches to cell phone privacy and legal advocacy, establish ongoing relationships that could, where appropriate, lead to shared interventions in key cases in the form of amicus briefs, and engage and build relationships with non-legal stakeholders whose support can contribute to the advocacy efforts for legal reform, and the efforts to establish new precedents for the digital age.