Cookie Issue: The Bulldog Is Happy To Publish A Response

This is a response from Rideau-Jock Councillor David Brown to an inquiry from long-time Bulldog reader Douglas Arnold. The note was provided by Arnold:

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Hi Doug,

While I don’t monitor what the Bulldog publishes, I’ll respond to you as best I can. First, the AG is completely independent. The OAG website is not part of the City’s infrastructure and it is administered by the OAG.

An easy way around this is to browse the web in incognito mode. This way no information is collected while you are visiting various webpages.

If you have a specific concern about the use of cookies on any website, I encourage you to reach out to the OAG directly.

I did scroll down on the OAG website and clicked on the Privacy Policy and was redirected to the Ottawa.ca page that outlines the corporate policy on Privacy https://ottawa.ca/en/terms-use#privacy

As for the City’s inability to provide a comment, I don’t know when the request was made for a comment, who it was directed to, if a deadline for a reply was communicated or any of the other details surrounding the story or issue. These questions would best be posed to the OAG.

I hope you are enjoying your summer.

David

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A note from the editor.

David Brown appears to be more interested in when The Bulldog posed the question to city public relations rather than the fact that the ‘independent’ auditor general (who is a member of the city leadership team with other municipal executives and subject to the directives of the politicians on the city audit committee) is possibly harvesting information on people using the ‘confidential’ website. Some people who go to the AG’s website are whistleblowers. Is their ‘confidential’ personal information harvested by cookies? if so, how is it used? No response.

It has been 24 hours now since the request for information was made by The Bulldog. This publication is prepared to run the response either from city media relations or the AG’s office or the auditor general herself on the purpose of those cookies. Certainly the AG’s office has read this story by now and if it hasn’t, why not?

Your agent has in the past waited days to get answers from city public relations. I’m unprepared to do that any more. City public relations was given an opportunity to respond and it did not. If city PR felt the AG’s office should respond, they could forward the inquiry to the AG’s office. It takes about 20 seconds.

Brown looks as though he used the AG’s website proper to access the privacy policy. To get to that, the user must agree to the cookie waiver first. On The Bulldog’s Chrome browser, the hotkey on the popup box to the privacy policy did not work in regular or confidential mode on the internet’s most popular browser. Thus you had to agree to allow cookies to be used to access the privacy policy.

The Bulldog will repeat that it is prepared to publish a response from the AG’s office if it will make a statement. So far, it has chosen not to. The Bulldog’s email address is on the website but to make it easy, it is kengray20@gmail.com.

Worth noting to the councillor, incognito mode in Chrome is not completely private. It shields your browsing from being recorded on the user’s (the person using incognito mode) computer.

If the councillor, the AG’s office, city media relations or the audit committee head would like further information, the Bulldog is happy to respond.

To read the original story on the issue, click here.

cheers

kgray

For You:

Confidential AG’s Website Uses Cookies

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The Ugly In Ottawa: MULVIHILL

Pay Councillors What They’re Worth: CRERAR

City Hall Can’t Fill A Pothole: BENN

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