Weaponizing The GDPR: Gamers Want To Use It To Flood Blizzard With Requests As Protest Over China Appeasement

from the what-exciting-times dept

We live in such fascinating times. We've had some posts concerning people getting (rightly) angry about Blizzard banning a top player who supported the protests in Hong Kong. In order to make the company feel more heat, apparently some pissed off players have been plotting to weaponize the GDPR and flood the company with data requests. This started with a Reddit post directly telling users that if they're upset about Blizzard's decisions regarding Hong Kong, to hit back with a GDPR request:

I know a lot of people, myself included, are upset by Blizzard/Activisions spineless decision to ban Blitxchung. After personally uninstalling all of my Blizzard games, I thought, "what else can I do?". The answer, is GDPR requests. Let me explain.

Under EU law, you're allowed to request all information a company has on you, along with the purpose of this information collection. What most people don't know, is that these requests are VERY hard to comply with, and can often take a companies legal group 2-7 days to complete PER REQUEST. If a company doesn't get you the information back in 30 days, they face fines and additional issues. In extreme cases, a company can request an additional 2 months to complete the requests if there is a large volume, but suffice to say, if a company gets a significant amount of requests, it can be incredibly expensive to deal with, as inevitably they will have to hire outside firms/lawyers to help out. So, if you want to submit a GDPR request, and live in the EU, you can use the following form letter....

I've actually been in the middle of investigating a different story about a possible weaponizing of the GDPR, but the details there have been a bit murkier, so it's fascinating to see things laid out so clearly here. To be clear, there does appear to be some cleverness here, though, it's true that such requests are a pain in the ass to comply with and can be costly and resource intensive. And while it may be fun and cathartic to use that power against a company like Blizzard as a way to punish it for its ridiculous stance, be clear that these kinds of weaponized GDPR requests are likely to be used against many others as well, including companies you might actually like.

This is yet one more reason why, even if you support the overall goals of the GDPR, you should be very, very concerned with how the law is actually implemented.

Filed Under: appeasement, china, costs, data requests, gdpr, protest, weaponizing
Companies: blizzard

Auditor: Canadian Law Enforcement's Statistics On ISP Subscriber Data Requests Completely Unreliable

from the obfuscation-by-statistical-shrugs dept

Intrusive surveillance programs -- especially domestic surveillance programs -- are sold to wary legislators with promises of stringent oversight and periodic reporting. That's how they're sold. The reality is nowhere near as assuring.

The warrantless acquisition of Canadian ISP subscriber information was so thoroughly exploited by law enforcement that by 2011, subscriber data was being requested every 27 seconds. The recent addition of a warrant requirement has slowed these requests to a comparative crawl and resulted in cases being dropped by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). With this information no longer available on demand, law enforcement is apparently having to prioritize its cases. You know a system has gone off the rails when agencies would rather cherry pick enforcement efforts than deal with something so "onerous" as a warrant application.

No matter what the process entails, there's supposed to be oversight in place to prevent abusive behavior and/or civil liberties violations. In Canada, the oversight body is willing, but the law enforcement body is weak… and riddled with massive holes.

Last fall, Daniel Therrien, the government’s newly appointed Privacy Commissioner of Canada, released the annual report on the Privacy Act, the legislation that governs how government collects, uses, and discloses personal information. The lead story from the report was the result of an audit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police practices regarding warrantless requests for telecom subscriber information.

The audit had been expected to shed new light into RCMP information requests. Auditors were forced to terminate the investigation, however, when they realized that Canada’s national police force simply did not compile the requested information. When asked why the information was not collected, RCMP officials responded that its information management system was never designed to capture access requests.

So, there is no audit. And without a periodic audit, there can be no oversight. There may be an entity in place to collate reported data, but what's being reported is incomplete and inaccurate. And not in any small way. The problem appears to be systemic, ingrained and possibly deliberately misleading. Some meaningful details have been redacted from the memo, but the mostly intact closing paragraph is far from comforting.

In conclusion, based on our review of statistics and interviews with senior officials at the RCMP we were unable to rely upon the numbers provided for warrantless access requests, nor was there any linkage between reports of such requests and the actual operational files containing such requests.

And the oversight entity? Apparently, almost as untrustworthy. Michael Geist points out that crucial wording was omitted from the Privacy Commissioner's official report.

The incident highlights the limits of Canadian oversight over law enforcement and surveillance activities. The use of the privacy commissioner’s audit power is frequently lauded as a mechanism to ensure that government does not run afoul of the law. Yet despite identifying inaccurate and incomplete data on a high profile privacy issue, the public audit report does not use the terms “inaccurate” or “incomplete.”

The commissioner may have kept these damning terms (temporarily) out of the public's eye in the official report, but even the more hedged version deployed there does nothing to instill confidence in the RCMP's ability to handle this access responsibly or to submit to any form of accountability.

Ultimately, our efforts to review files, combined with our interviews with RCMP personnel, did not allow us to determine whether the RCMP, as a whole, was compliant, or non-compliant, with the provisions of the Privacy Act with respect to the collection of subscriber information without a warrant. Moreover, other than through a manual review of all case files stored, the RCMP does not have a means to demonstrate its compliance in this regard.

Even if the Privacy Commissioner is unwilling to say it, the conclusions speak for themselves. The RCMP is "non-compliant." Stringent procedures that were implemented to ensure accountability have been largely ignored. The RCMP tries to claim it's really just a "software program," but that assertion doesn't explain why more than four years down the road from the cited 2010 report, nothing has changed.

There is a likely explanation for this lack of careful reporting by the RCMP. For one, it helps obscure the paper trail. It also makes the possibility of mounting a legal challenge on its domestic data-gathering a much more daunting prospect. The RCMP may be unable to show what it's doing right, but its lack of proper documentation helps ensure it will be equally as hard to prove it's doing anything wrong.

Filed Under: canada, data requests, law enforcement, privacy