The Supreme Court of Canada ruled today that police must obtain a warrant or court order to obtain the IP address of a person or organization. CBC News reports: The Supreme Court was asked to consider whether only IP addresses with no personal information attached would be protected by an expectation of privacy under the Charter. In a split 5-4 decision, the court said that the numbers that make up a person's IP address have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that simply retrieving the number constitutes a search. Justice Andromache Karakatsanis, speaking for the majority, wrote that IP addresses are “a critical link between Internet users and their online activities.” “The subject matter of this search was therefore the information that these IP addresses could reveal about a particular Internet user, including ultimately that user's identity,” Justice Suzanne Cote wrote for the four dissenting members. , speaking for the judges, disagreed with this central point and said there should be no expectation of privacy regarding IP addresses alone. […]
In the Supreme Court's majority judgment, Karakatsanis said that considering only the information related to IP addresses that should be protected by the Charter, and not the IP addresses themselves, is a “piecemeal” approach that ignores the broader purpose of the Charter. It reflects a lot of reasoning.” The ruling states that privacy interests can be revealed by an IP address by itself, “without regard to what can be revealed in combination with other available information, especially information obtained from third-party websites.” He said that it cannot be limited to. Additionally, it said that IP addresses are protected by the Charter because they unlock a user's identity and therefore come with a reasonable expectation of privacy. “if [the Charter] “To meaningfully protect Canadians' online privacy in today's overwhelmingly digital world, we must protect their IP addresses,” the judgment said.
Justice Cote, speaking for Justices Richard Wagner, Malcolm Rowe and Michelle Obonsowin, said that IP addresses “are not sought for their own sake” but “for the information they reveal. ” he admitted. “However, the evidence record in this case demonstrates that IP addresses by themselves reveal only limited information,” she wrote. Cote said the biographical information the law is intended to protect is not revealed by access to IP addresses, she said. Police must use that IP address to track a customer's IP address and access personal information held by her ISP or website to identify the customer's habits. “IP addresses alone don't even reveal your browsing habits,” she writes Cote. “What it reveals is your ISP, and there's very little information that's as private as your power usage or heat emissions.” Court said placing a reasonable expectation of privacy solely on an IP address is not a good idea for Canadians. He said it would upset the careful balance the Supreme Court has established between the privacy interests of Americans and the needs of law enforcement. The dissenting opinion stated that “to effectively hold that any action taken in an investigation involves a reasonable expectation of privacy would be inconsistent with a functional approach to defining the subject matter of an investigation.”