Senate of Canada pushes for open banking as Canadians worry about their personal data: report

Sixty-four percent of Canadians strongly disagree that a company should be able to share their personal information for a purpose other than providing them with a service, according to a recent report from the Senate of Canada.

These stats come as nearly four million Canadians use third-party financial service apps that use a method called ‘screen scraping’ to access users’ banking information, according to the report.

The user provides the third-party app, usually a fintech app, with their banking credentials, which the app then uses to get customer data.

Although this is convenient, users don’t have any control over the duration or range of the app’s access to their data, as the report outlines. They also don’t have any control over how that specific data is being handled or used.

The report also found that around 30 percent of Canadians feel that they don’t have control over how their personal information is being used, whether by the government or a company.

In an attempt to solve this, the Senate of Canada has called for the implementation of ‘Open Banking,’ which keeps login credentials confidential. It gives users the ability to direct their bank to share only selected data with other businesses, and also gives users more ways to make payments through their bank accounts.

Interestingly, the report also found that 29 percent of Canadians believe that the federal government doesn’t respect their privacy rights.

The report from the Senate of Canada was filed through a series of surveys conducted by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada from 2018 to 2019.

Source: Senate of Canada