Privacy commissioner investigating Liberal government's electoral reform survey

The federal privacy commissioner is investigating a complaint against MyDemocracy.ca, the Liberal government's online survey about electoral reform, and has already provided recommendations aimed at protecting survey respondents.

The website was launched last week by Maryam Monsef, the minister of democratic institutions, and was quickly criticized by Conservatives and New Democrats as a poorly conceived attempt to gauge public opinion.

But concerns about privacy were also raised.

"We have been in contact with the Privy Council Office and have provided preliminary recommendations with a view to better protecting the privacy of people who participate in the MyDemocracy.ca survey," a spokeswoman for the commissioner explained on Wednesday.

It is not yet clear what those recommendations were or whether they resulted in changes.

The office of the commissioner has also received a complaint about the survey that will be investigated. Details of the complaint are not yet available.

Individuals responding to the survey at MyDemocracy.ca are asked for information such as their gender, income and postal code.

According to the founder of Vox Pop Labs, the company that constructed the survey for the federal government, "demographic data is matched to population-level estimates such as the census so that each case can be weighted to reflect the demographic distributions in the Canadian population," said Clifton van der Linden.

Specific details such as postal code and birth year will be deleted and replaced by broader identifiers and age ranges when the data is reported, said van der Linden.

Users can also enter an email address to have the results of the survey sent to them, but van der Linden said those addresses are "not retained at all. They are used solely to send the user a link to their results on MyDemocracy.ca and are never stored in our system."

John O'Leary, Monsef's director of communications, said the government is "confident the steps we are taking through MyDemocracy.ca are protecting personal privacy."

"Sharing demographic information is entirely voluntary and optional on MyDemocracy.ca," O'Leary said in a statement. "We look forward to working with the privacy commissioner and reviewing any recommendations the commissioner may make. We'll continue to do all we can to protect privacy while empowering Canadians in this important conversation about electoral reform."