Some Privacy is More Private Than Others

One of the things that struck me in researching the long and tortuous story of how the government is trying to move British Columbian’s private data into off-shore cloud computing services was the odd choice of the pilot project for the whole scheme: STADD.

What’s STADD? It’s “Services to Adults with Developmental Disabilities”.

That’s right, adults with developmental disabilities are the subjects of the BC government’s experiment to see “hmm, I wonder if we can offshore private data using fancy tokenization software”.

Let me put some icing on the cake.

The BC Liberal caucus has to manage information about the citizens who access services via their constituency offices. These are their “customers” and they use a “customer relationship management” (CRM) system to hold the information.

Are they storing this personal information offshore? Are they trying to shoehorn it into salesforce.com using tokenization software to avoid FOIPPA restrictions and protect their constituents from the PATRIOT Act?

No, that would be risky, that’s the kind of thing that STADD can pilot. The BC Liberal caucus uses a product called “Maximizer CRM”. Designed, built and hosted in… Vancouver, British Columbia.