“My investigation of the location tracking done by Tim Hortons on its customers started in October 2019, when my phone received an alert that said the company’s app had checked my location in the background — in other words, I was not using the app at the time. After I filed a request for all of my personal information that Tim Hortons held, a right that every Canadian has under PIPEDA, I received a trove of data indicating that the app was indeed tracking me.
Canada’s privacy laws have ‘no teeth’: What I learned during an eight-month investigation into Tim Hortons’ data tracking by James McLeod on The Chronical Herald
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The point is that technology companies design their services in ways that make it impossible for a user to know what’s really going on behind the scenes. Key questions remain: How can I have any hope of controlling where my data winds up if I don’t even know who has my data? How can I consent to something when I don’t know it’s happening? None of this is unique to Tim Hortons. Technology systems today are built to provide a clean user interface and hide the guts of the system. The public doesn’t know what is happening behind the facade, whether it’s Tim Hortons doing location tracking, or Google LLC and Facebook Inc. using every possible scrap of data to target ads. However, public trust is the casualty when consumers know they’re being used, but not how they and their data are specifically being used. And if we don’t know how our technology works, we suspect the worst.”
