One Step Forward or Two Steps Back? R. v. Tessling and the Privacy Consequences for Information Held by Third Parties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled in R. v. Tessling that the RCMP's use of infrared camera technology without a warrant violated s. 8 of the Charter, Mr. Tessling's lawyer argued that this decision "raise[s] the protection of privacy for everyone".2 This comment disagrees and argues that although Tessling puts the brakes on the warrantless use of surveillance technology by the state, it actually makes it easier for the state to get access to information held by third parties without a warrant. This lowers, rather than raises, the protection of privacy in Canada. In particular, the Ontario Court of Appeal's attempt to distinguish the search in Tessling from the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in R. v. Plant may be detrimental to the overall privacy afforded to Canadians under the Charter.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".