Review: The Clean Money Revolution by Joel Solomon

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The idea of “Clean Money” is an attractive one.  We are intimately familiar with the harms that concentrated money can cause, whether it’s the corrosive effect of money on politics, the ability of large corporations to buy legal immunity by dragging out the legal process indefinitely, or the fact that the financial system is set up to benefit the 1% at the expense of the 99%.  We are less familiar with the ways that concentrated money can be used in positive ways.

Joel Solomon’s The Clean Money Revolution provides passionate proof that money is a tool, and it’s the quality of the people using it that determines the quality of the effects it has.  It’s at once a moral plea to those with money to recognize the power that money grants them and a memoir of Joel’s successes in living that morality by helping others put their money (and Joel’s) to good use.

It’s hopeful and inspiring in its attempt to envision a world where our financial and social systems evolve gracefully into a more sustainable, stable, just future rather than collapsing around our ears into chaos and anarchy.  In a world where corporate money ensures that governments stay impotent against the various social and environmental crises that might cost those corporations their quarterly profits, the idea that Clean Money used well can be a force for positive change is a refreshing, if idealistic vision.

And, thanks to Joel’s intimate knowledge in the arcane arts of investing and business, it’s also a seductively convincing vision.  Joel knows how money works.  He knows how to use it wisely, and he’s also not afraid to point out how it can be (and is being) used badly.  He’s candidly aware that the current level of socially aware investing is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of capital that is pulling in the other direction.  And yet, his book is the Clean Money Revolution, and he believes that the revolution has started.  He believes that, at the very least, there is a path forward that will shift vast amounts of money from the old, profit-at-any-cost mentality to a new, more sustainable and socially responsible mindset.  And he believes that this transition will be shepherded by the Millennials as they take over management of the funds from the Boomer generation.  As a Millennial, I find that flattering.

Unfortunately, I also find it unrealistic.  And, to be honest, on an intellectual level at least, I think so does Joel.  He comments that if we use only our intellect, we have no reason to believe we will be able to avoid the social and environmental collapse that is the consequence of unsustainable use of resources and misuse of money.  To be successful, his revolution requires spiritual fortitude and a deep sense of purpose, both on a personal level and in our culture.  Wise words from a member of the hippy generation:  Change comes from the heart, not from the head.

I have two major criticisms of his book, both of which are intellectual.  Thus, I hope they will be useful for understanding the flaws in the book, but not fatal to the intent of it.

The first major criticism is that it relies on those who have wealth to develop the spiritual conscience necessary to invest their wealth responsibly.  And it’s not just some of the wealthy.  It must be all of them, or at least a large majority.  There must be a cultural shift among the very wealthy that pushes them in the direction of “Clean Money”.  He believes this will happen when control of the wealth shifts to Millennials.  In other words, it will happen through inheritance.

Unfortunately, a key part of Joel’s own relationship to money is defined by the fact that he inherited his wealth young, while he was still in his idealistic 20’s, and before he had been fully groomed as an heir to his family’s fortune.  And, most of the other Clean Money investors whose stories he tells share similar backgrounds.  There is no reason to expect that most of the Millennial heirs to the $100 trillion that will change generational hands will inherit young.  There’s much reason to think that, in addition to inheriting wealth, the rarefied group of multi-million dollar heirs will also inherit their parents’ strongly profit-driven values.  Sadly, a plan that counts on the majority of those in power to naturally use that power for good is not a very good plan.

The second criticism is perhaps the more serious one.  Joel correctly identifies wealth inequality as one of the most serious issues that must be solved.  It’s an issue that directly relates to money.  Yet, the book advocates that wealthy investors can have it all:  They can invest Clean Money and still profit at the end of it.  Perhaps they do not take as much profit, but the model is still a capitalistic one in which investments are ultimately expected to pay off monetarily.  Such an approach cannot solve the issue of inequality — not alone at any rate.

The reason is structural.  It’s a fundamental law of money that wealth generates money.  This is the way that the wealthy have lived for generations, and it’s the reason why the wealthy stay wealthy.  Once you have a pile of wealth, you hire a money manager to invest the wealth and you live off the profits of the investments.  The bigger the pile of wealth, the bigger the profits you have to live on.  This is the principle that endowments, hedge funds and foundations operate on:  The principal is invested, and only the profits are spent, thus ensuring the perpetual financial security of the person or organization that owns the wealth.  It’s a sound financial strategy.  Unfortunately, it’s also the fundamental cause of wealth inequality:  The more quickly wealth gets accumulated, the less that wealth is available for everyone else.

Joel has lots to say about this.  He writes extensively about spending down the principal, about ensuring that foundations invest their principal as Clean Money, and about divesting money that is supporting harmful organizations.  Unfortunately, as important as all those things are, they are still all in service of profit:  Endowments are still intended to preserve wealth, and even the strategies for spending down principal involve making investments that are ultimately intended to recoup with a profit.  No matter how well the money is invested, it’s still expected to accumulate over time.

Such an approach is impossible.  Inequality builds up pressure, and historically the only ways that pressure is released is through appropriation (as in the French Revolution), warfare (as in WWII), or inflation.  Of these, inflation is the safest — though still tumultuous — option.  Only when the rate of inflation rises above the rate of return that endowments generate — only then does the distribution of wealth become more equal:  The inflation in everyone else’s wealth out-paces the natural tendency of wealth to grow.  In such a situation, the return on investment is no longer “profitable”, because the real value of the wealth at the end of the investment is less than the value that that wealth would have had if it has just been left on its own.  The Clean Money Revolution does not solve this problem — wealth inequality is inevitable as long as our central banks maintain policies that are designed to minimize or prevent inflation.

Thus, the Clean Money Revolution is not the panacea that Joel hopes it is.  It’s not enough of a revolution. We cannot escape the financial, environmental, and social crises that face us solely through enlightened investment.  There is more to the story (there always is).  But … intellectual flaws aside, there is still much value in stories of hope and inspiration that Joel writes about.  Just because Clean Money is not the solution does not mean it cannot be part of a solution.  Investing generously and selflessly is certainly better than investing blindly and selfishly.  Even if we must shrink our collective wealth for the sake of surviving sustainably, the organizations and institutions that help us live sustainably must still be grown — and will inevitably produce financial profits while they grow.  Clean Money must be part of that growth.

On a more personal level, the book is not just inspiring in general; it inspired me to seek out the environment in which Joel nurtured his skills with Clean Money:  Hollyhock.  As a documentary filmmaker, I’m driven by the desire to create social change.  And I’m also painfully aware of how difficult it is to find money to support that social change.  And, once I’ve created a documentary, I’m aware that it needs to be seen by the people with the power to help create social change:  People with money and big ideas.  If nothing else, Joel’s book has convinced me that I can find all of those things at Hollyhock.  I’ve signed up for a workshop at Hollyhock called Story, Money, Impact.  Here’s hoping that my journey there helps me find people who believe in Joel’s vision:  The vision of Clean Money.

Who gets to own our culture?

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In honour of Techdirt’s World IP Day “anti-contest”, I’ve decided to write a few words about the relationship between copyright and culture.

Specifically, I’m interested in the question of who gets to own our culture, because copyright is the mechanism we use to answer that question.  Copyright — intellectual property — is the idea that when you create something — a photograph, a song, a film, or an essay like this one — you own that creation by virtue of being its creator.  You are free to publish it or to hide it away, to be magnanimous in sharing it with the world or to set up a toll booth and charge people for experiencing your creation.  All of those things belong to you by right — and that right is called copyright.  Thus are the seeds of ownership planted for all of the cultural artifacts that are created.

Culture is a different beast.  It’s also a very fuzzy concept.  When people talk about culture, they never quite seem to know exactly what they mean.  We often seem to think it has something to do with the arts — the “cultural industries” are the ones that produce things like literature and art and movies.  Or, perhaps it has something to do with having a shared language or ethnic background.  Or food.

What I mean by culture is this:  Culture is just the things that people share between them.  And, to the extent that they share things, they share a common culture.  Culture is the lingua franca that binds a particular group of people together, whether that group is a nation, a particular ethnicity, a company (as in “corporate culture”), or just a small group of friends.  Culture is made of the common experiences that bind a group together.  Whatever group it is, the most salient feature of culture is that it is shared within that group.

That feature puts it in direct conflict with the idea of copyright.  Because if culture is fundamentally about sharing, copyright is fundamentally about controlling who gets to share.  If you own the copyright on some cultural artifact — let’s say the new Star Wars movie — you control who gets to watch Star Wars.  By extension, that also means you control who gets to talk about Star Wars and what they are allowed to say about it.  Because, if you can’t watch Star Wars, you lose access to the culture that is Star Wars and the things you are able to say about it will be very limited.

In a very real way, owning copyright means owning a piece of culture.  And, with that in mind, let’s return to the question of who gets to own our culture.  Initially, copyright belongs to creators.  There’s an intuitive appeal to this arrangement; it makes sense that the originator of a piece of culture gets to own it.  But, in reality, it is not creators who own our culture.  In fact, much of the culture that matters — the culture that is shared widely enough to be known on a large scale — is owned by large media conglomerates.  Star Wars is owned by the Walt Disney Company, not by George Lucas.

Of course, saying that our culture is owned by giant media conglomerates is a gross over-simplification.  Copyright is automatic and universal, which means everything from the e-mail you wrote to your boss last week to Donald Trump’s latest tweet is covered under copyright as a potential cultural artifact.  And there are plenty of aspects of culture that are not covered under copyright at all — language and food being two obvious examples.

Still, there is something significant about the amount of control that media companies exert on our culture.  And that significance is evidenced by the phrase that I used to describe it.  Media conglomerates don’t just own a lot of culture.  They own a lot of culture that matters.  In crass corporate terms:  They make it their business to own culture that is worth a lot of money, and, if possible, to increase the amount of money that they can earn from that culture.  What determines which culture is worth money?  Or, put another way, what determines cultural value?  We’ve already answered that question:  It is the culture that is most widely shared.

That’s significant, because it belies the intuition we had about copyright belonging rightly to creators.  It’s not creators that create cultural value.  The value comes much more from the sharing than from the creation.  A moment’s thought will confirm this.  Of the immense number of copyrightable creations, only a vanishingly small number will gain any significant amount of cultural relevance.  Chances are, the e-mail to your boss has absolutely no cultural relevance, and neither does the gorgeous piece of art that you framed and put on your wall.  It is not the act of creation that makes culture; it’s what happens to that creation after it leaves the hands of the creator.

We are now in a position to answer the question we asked at the beginning:  Who gets to own our culture?  The answer is this:  The people who popularize it.  Media conglomerates end up owning a lot copyrighted culture because they profit from taking raw creations and promoting them to the status of culture.  And, generally, creators are only too happy to exchange their copyrights for money and a bit of cultural notoriety.

Having answered the initial question, we can now ask a deeper question, the real question, namely, if significant parts of our culture are owned by the media conglomerates that popularize them, is this a desirable state of affairs?  And the answer, I think, is an unequivocal no.

This new question — the real question — is a question about power.  The question is about who has the power to determine what is culturally important and which voices get heard.  And the reason why the answer is no, the reason why we do not want media conglomerates to own our culture is because their choices about what is culturally important are dictated by what makes them the most money, not by the merits of the cultural artifacts that they promote.

When Disney decides to finance another Star Wars movie instead of a biting satire of the political system, that decision is driven by money, not by artistic merit or cultural need.  And, as a business, that’s their prerogative.  But, just because that decision is good for Disney does not make it a good one for our culture.  And our culture is more important than Disney’s bottom line.  As a culture we need to ask:  Who do we want to own our culture?  Who gets the power to decide what is culturally important?  We can do much better than outsourcing this power to giant media conglomerates.  But … how?

They key lies in the mechanism for owning culture:  Copyright.  By allowing companies to buy and concentrate ownership of copyright, we have turned culture into a commodity, where one piece of culture is as good as another as long as it can be bought and sold.  In such a market, it is money that dictates cultural importance, not ideas or artistic merit.

What is the alternative?  One possibility would be to attach copyright to the creator permanently, to make creators the permanent owners and guardians of the culture they create.  The appeals to the intuition that creators should own culture, and perhaps they would do a better job of cultivating culture than corporations.  But, such an arrangement ignores the fact that cultural value truly comes from sharing, not from creation.  If we are to respect that fact, our culture must be owned by all of us.  Which is to say, it should be a commons, owned by no one.

If we want our culture to be a marketplace of ideas, where the best ideas rise to the top and gain the most cultural resonance, we cannot allow it to be a marketplace of commerce, where the most successful ideas are the ones with the most money behind them.  To achieve that, to de-commodify our culture, we cannot allow culture to be owned.  Once culture can be owned, it can be bought and sold.

To do that, our system of copyright must change drastically.  Instead of being a system of ownership — a system of intellectual property — it must become a system for protecting the integrity of our culture.  If copyright is about who has the power to shape our culture and whose voices get heard, it needs to vest that power in the people who are best suited to creating and improving our culture, and it needs to concentrate that power in the hands of the people who have the best track record of creating positive cultural change.

This means creators.  But, not just any creators; it means creators who drive our culture forward.  Rather than rewarding every act of creation with ownership, copyright should reward those who create culturally significant works with the resources to continue creating them.

The mechanism for this is not ownership but reputation.  Rather than controlling who is allowed to access culture, copyright should encourage culture to be shared as widely as possible.  After all, culture is built on sharing.  But, whenever a piece of culture is shared, whenever the stock of that culture begins to rise, that culture should bear the imprint of its creator, and the creator should be indelibly identified with that creation.  In this way, the creators of the most resonant pieces of culture will become culturally significant along with their creations — and will be in a position to reap the benefits.

Copyright would thus become a system for ensuring that social power flows to the most culturally significant people rather than to people who are famous for being famous.  Imagine a world where we had never heard of Paris Hilton but Marie Curie had attained equivalent status and social power.

Achieving such a system in today’s political environment seems … unrealistic to say the least.  And, exploring such a radical change to copyright in depth would like require a book or two (or a documentary).  So, in envisioning this new kind of copyright system, I do not expect to make it a reality.  But, in all the reading I’ve done about copyright over the years (and it’s quite a lot), I’ve often felt that the problems of copyright have been much better explained than any sort of vision for what copyright could be.  Perhaps that’s why copyright seems to have progressively become worse for culture rather than better.

So, in honour of World IP Day (though probably not in the spirit intended by WIPO), I hope I have articulated a vision of copyright that could enliven and enrich our culture rather than restrict it.  As imperfect as it is, at least it holds a glimpse of a better system.

Congratulations Mr. Trudeau. Now, about that election promise…

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We got what we wanted.

Harper is gone.

I think we may have overcompensated though.

This time, yesterday, I was contemplating whether I would be driving through the streets in the evening, honking the horn like we do when the Canucks win a playoff series.

But, now that results are counted, I just feel empty, like a breakup after a bad relationship.  I don’t take joy in our new Liberal majority, just relief the worst-case scenario didn’t happen.

This time, we voted strategically, and it worked.  Oh boy, did it ever work.  We listened to the pundits who told us voter turnout was a problem, and our voter turnout went up to 69%.  Our youth voted.  Our First Nations voted.  And we all voted strategically.

We got more that we bargained for.  In our fear of Harper, we threw all our votes at his strongest opponent, and the result is a Liberal majority.

In doing so, we have become victims of the broken first-past-the-post again.  We did not want a majority.  Popular vote for the Liberals was 39.5% — almost exactly the same popular vote that elected Harper in 2011.  We wanted a minority that would force parties to work together, to compromise across party lines.

Past estimates of the effectiveness of strategic voting put the effect at about 5% at most.  But, the effect in this election was far greater.

We started the election a more or less dead heat.  The left vote was split; we needed strategic voting and local polling to figure out who to vote for so we could defeat Harper.  30% of us wanted a Liberal government, another 30% wanted NDP to win.

The popular vote in the final tally put Liberal support at 40%, and NDP at 20%.  The Conservatives attracted 30%:  The same percentage they started the election with.  The Liberals basically took 10% of the votes from the NDP, or about 1/3 of their supporters.  The Green party also dropped by about 1/3, from 5% to 3.5%.

That 10% is the strategic vote.

There’s a trap here.  The strategic vote started to swing as soon as the polls started to show a clear winner.  The infamous niqab debate that cost Mulcair support in Quebec, even temporarily, became a signal that the Liberals were the stronger party.  And the dogpile started.

In an ideal world, all the strategic voters would have been watching local polls, and the strategic voters would have split according to the strength of their local ridings. That didn’t happen, because local polls are expensive and infrequent.

It was much easier to watch poll *projections* on threehundredeight.ca (aka the CBC poll tracker) and other similar sites.  These projections were more accessible and more widely publicized, and thus constituted the most frequent source of poll data for strategic voters, to our detriment.

The problem with projections is that they are derived from national polls, which only report provincial-level variations, not riding-level ones.  Thus, when Mulcair’s support dipped in Quebec, all the Quebec projections started to favour Trudeau, even though this was not uniformly true across the province.  And a Quebec dogpile started.

Once the swing started in Quebec, it started to affect the national polls … which began to affect projections in other provinces.  The whole thing snowballed, leaving only the NDP’s base (mainly urban pockets in B.C., Ontario, and Quebec).

This election validated everything we were told about the power of strategic voting, the power of voter turnout, and the power of the Youth and First Nations votes.  We found our voice.  But, we found it in a immense primal scream, not an articulate oration.

I regret not voting Green.  I regret voting strategically.  I regret the cynicism that I gained in 2011, when I could have sworn that the momentum was against Harper, and I could have sworn that the Youth would show up at the polls.  I was wrong in 2011, and it affected my expectations for this election.  It made me mistrust the anti-Harper rhetoric I was hearing, and trust the polls that gave Harper a legitimate chance of winning the election.

We have a danger now.  The Liberals have promised electoral reform, but they have just benefitted massively from our winner-takes-all first-past-the-post voting system.  I am sure the powers that be within that party are thinking of ways to delay or avoid their promise of electoral reform.

We needed a cooperative minority to ensure electoral reform, a minority in which the lines of power weren’t clearly drawn, where it wasn’t so clear who benefitted from first-past-the-post.

Will the political momentum for reform be as strong when Harper is 18 months in our memories — when Trudeau has promised to introduce legislation?  It will not be.

So, while I will quietly celebrate our new, non-Harper Prime Minister, I only have half of what I wanted in this election.  The other half requires holding Trudeau to his promise of electoral reform.

Time for some horse trading

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Dear “next” Prime Ministers of Canada, Messers Mulcair and Trudeau:

It’s time to take action. Mr. Harper has spent the last two weeks taking control of the election campaign by throwing “dead cats” into the debate, and the result has been an ugly, racist media bloodbath about niqabs and terrorism. Both of you talk about avoiding fear-based politics, and this is nothing if not just that. Both of you are failing to prevent this fear-mongering. It’s time to throw your own cat on the table. A live one.

What “live” cat would that be? Strategic voting. Or maybe it’s an elephant in the room, not a cat. Everyone is talking about strategic voting; it’s everywhere in the media, both social and traditional. There are numerous grassroots strategic voting campaigns commissioning their own polls to enable it. Yet, both of you are largely silent on the subject.

This is understandable. You are both in this to win it, and talking about strategic voting injects some doubt into your messages. But let’s face some facts. A majority of voters see your parties as roughly interchangeable. A majority of voters think it’s more important to get rid of Stephen Harper than it is to elect either one of your specific parties. If polls are to be believed this majority is roughly 60%: the number of voters who count Liberal and NDP as their #1 and #2 votes.

So, it’s time for some strategic horse trading. Ali Kashani has identified 16 ridings where the Conservatives have a narrow lead over one of your parties, and the other party is significantly behind. These are all ridings where a Conservative victory is likely unless something changes, and none of them are three-way races. There are 8 Conservative-Liberal races, and 8 Conservative-NDP races. Both of your parties stand to gain 8 seats at the expense of Harper’s Conservatives, and in the process, one of you will likely win a minority government at Harper’s expense.

To gain these seats, you need to endorse strategic voting, and in some small way, each other. You both need to acknowledge that, while you would like your party to be elected, you would rather see each other in opposition than Mr. Harper. And, in doing so, you would need to cooperate to trade these 16 ridings between you. Have the weaker candidate endorse the stronger, and both of your parties will be better off, to say nothing of the citizens of Canada. Mr. Kashani has laid out the details in this Medium article here: https://medium.com/…/there-is-actually-a-way-to-guarantee-h…

If you truly want to derail Harper’s politics of fear, and re-take control of the campaign, I can think of no better way of re-taking control of the debate than by mutually endorsing each other in certain key ridings. Suddenly, instead of talking about niqabs, the conversation will shift to how the NDP and the Liberals have done the unthinkable: They are *cooperating*. They are acknowledging what every progressive voter in the country already knows: Harper is poison for this country.

The media will eat this up. The media has been reporting on strategic voting for nine weeks now. They have been reporting the same story for nine weeks because they know it gets attention. They know people care about this issue. Imagine what that media coverage would look like if you actually gave them something to report on. Imagine how many other voters would reconsider your parties because you are actually giving people what they want to see.

There is no downside here, except that you will both have to eat some pride. So, I’m calling on both of you: Please, just pick up the phone and have a conversation. See what you can work out. You don’t have to make it 16 ridings — your own internal polling is probably far more accurate than any publicly reported numbers. But, those close Conservative battles exist for both your parties. I’m sure you can figure out which ridings deserve cross-party endorsement.

I look forward to a Canada led by one of you as Prime Minister. Please, help each other make it happen. As a voter, I *desperately* want to see the two of you cooperate. I don’t care about your ideologies, or your platforms. I care about electing people who will work with others and make the right decisions. I can’t think of a better way that either of you can demonstrate that than to acknowledge the elephant in the room, and to work together for a better Canada.

All the best,

Devon Cooke
Vancouver South

At last! Affordable housing in Vancouver

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I’ve been searching for affordable housing in Vancouver for years, and I’ve finally found it:  My dream housing development! Full size, detached, 3 bedroom homes, starting from just $999,000! My neighbourhood is near Marine Drive Canada Line Station, and the … Continue reading →

Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?

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Is Rogers Selling your Location Data?

There’s a rule of thumb about clickbait headlines that says if the headline is asking a question, the answer is no.  Except in this case, the answer is yes.  Yes, Rogers is definitely selling your location data.  They are selling your location data even if you are not a Rogers customer; the fact that they run Canada’s largest cellphone network, and one of Canada’s largest ISPs gives them access to pretty much anyone’s location, regardless of whether or not you do business with them.

Who are they selling it to?  We already know that Rogers (and every other Canadian telecom) will give your location to law enforcement.  Michael Geist reported that

three [Canadian] telecom providers alone disclosed information from 785,000 customer accounts in 2011. Moreover, virtually all providers sought compensation for complying with the requests.

It’s not clear how many of those requests include location data, but I wouldn’t bet against the answer being “most of them”.  We already know that Rogers is selling your location to law enforcement.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.  Law enforcement’s ability to track your location is a scandal in its own right, but these days, it’s old news.  At least law enforcement has the (dubious) justification that it helps them catch “bad guys”.  But Rogers isn’t just selling to law enforcement.  In fact, they are selling your location data to me.

Now, just to be clear, I have not actually purchased any location data.  But I could if I wanted to.  The data is definitely for sale, and it’s not for any lack of effort on Rogers’ part that I haven’t made a purchase.

I run a small business. That means I’m on more spam lists than I care to admit, and I receive calls on an almost weekly basis promising to put my website in the top 10 results on Google.  Most of these are obvious scams, but recently I received a call from a more professional-sounding organization called Rogers Outrank.  For some reason, I agreed to a half-hour sales call to talk about what Rogers could do to promote my business.

I won’t bore you with the details of the sales pitch.  Suffice to say that they made the usual promises to put me on the front page of Google’s search results (something Google might be interested in, since their advertising partners are not supposed to guarantee natural search results), and they provided extensive tools to generate sales calls from those results.

One of those tools caught my attention.  You can see why in this screenshot from their sales presentation:

Outrank Call MapThis is a map of inbound calls for the campaign.  The red pin is supposed to be the location of my business.  The blue pins represent people who have called the number associated with the sales campaign.  You can drill down and get more detailed information about each caller, including address.

Where does this information come from?  My friendly Rogers salesperson had the answer:

So the map is really cool because it lets you see where your leads are going to be calling you from, so if they use a landline, or from a desktop computer, they track the IP address to let us know where that person is calling from, and if it’s a mobile, it’s tracking GPS.

The salesperson assured me I would get this information regardless of who their service provider was:

Same idea, whether they are with Bell, Telus, Koodo — whatever other providers they are — we make sure that when anyone with any sort of brand is looking for your service, our goal is just make sure they are finding you, regardless of whether they are a Rogers client or not.

Let me say this loud and clear:  This is creepy.  Rogers is selling me the location data of anyone who calls my number, specifically so I can make decisions about how to sell them my services.  As a salesperson, that’s really useful, but it’s not an option I should have.  As a citizen and a private individual, I don’t want my whereabouts to be available to someone who is selling me something.  I don’t want that information to be available to anyone, and Rogers shouldn’t be selling it — especially when I have no business relationship with them.

Now, a few provisos:

  • It’s a salesperson, so the technical explanation of where the information comes from may not be accurate.  For mobile information in particular, I think it’s more likely that the location data comes from tracking SIM cards via cell tower triangulation than directly accessing the cell phone’s GPS.
  • Likewise, the salesperson doesn’t say outright that I can get addresses for people who don’t use Rogers … he simply implies that “their goal” is to provide me with useful information.  But, the map is pretty telling, and I made a point of asking how reliable the information on the map was.  He was pretty clear that I could expect to get reliable location data for all my incoming calls.
  • They aren’t selling location data as a separate product.  Technically, Rogers is selling a marketing service, which includes location data as part of the service.  I can’t buy the location data separately.
  • Locations are for inbound calls only.  That means I can’t just ask Rogers to track a given phone number; I only get locations for people who I have somehow convinced to call me.  But, Rogers’ product is marketing.  Their service is specifically designed to convince people to call me.

So, is this legal?  I have no idea; I’m not a lawyer.  I’d love to hear someone like Michael Geist chime in.  My guess:  Probably, it’s technically, arguably legal.  Rogers has plenty of cash to spend on lawyers.  The fact that they are only selling data from incoming calls probably comes with some sort of implied consent.  I have no idea how they would get around the fact that non-customers’ data is being sold (and thus, there can be no contractually-waived rights), but lawyers are smart.  I’m sure they’d figure something out.

Is it ethical?  Hell no.  Selling my location, without my knowledge and consent is wrong.  I pay my phone company because communicating by phone is a useful, almost essential service.  I understand that that privilege entails letting my phone company know where I am, and, by extension, any other phone company whose customers I talk to.  I understand that it’s not really possible to build a phone system if you don’t know the location of the phones you are calling.  I entrust the companies that run the phone system with my location because it is impossible to build the system without that information.

Selling my location to external parties — making my location public knowledge — is a violation of that trust.  Rogers is taking advantage of me.  They are taking advantage of you, and everyone else who uses the Canadian phone system.  My location does not need to be public knowledge for the phone system to function.  It is being made public purely because it is profitable for Rogers to do so.

I wish I could say I knew what to do about this.  It’s easy to say “don’t use a phone”, but it’s hardly a practical solution.  It’s possible a lawsuit could help stop this particular practice, but that only solves this specific issue; it doesn’t solve the structural issue of abusing private data for profit.  It’s possible an industry regulator — the privacy commissioner? — might be able to do something if I complain loudly and often enough.

Honestly, I think the most effective tool is probably public shaming, which is why I wrote this blog post.  My hope is that other people — you — will read this, and agree Rogers is doing wrong.  And I hope that you will share this post with other people, so those people know what Rogers is doing.  Rogers is selling our location data.  Their public image should reflect the reality of what they are doing.