Google Slams Ottawa’s New Internet Bill and Refuses to Build Privacy Backdoors

Google’s official submission to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security just dropped, and the tech giant is not holding back on the federal government’s Bill C-22. We’ve already heard from Apple and Meta, and now Google’s full submission is available.

In short, Google thinks the bill is a privacy nightmare that could pressure companies into building backdoors into their own secure products.

Google says it’s all for letting law enforcement do their job, but argues the bill as written goes way too far. The company is particularly uneasy about rules that would let the federal government issue sweeping technical directives or secret “ministerial orders” to monitor data, with little apparent limit on their scope.

The big flashpoint is encryption. Google made clear it isn’t budging on this one: “Google has never built a backdoor or other mechanism to circumvent end-to-end encryption in our products. If we say a product is end-to-end encrypted, it is end-to-end encrypted.”

Google calls the current language “unduly narrow” and arguing it leaves dangerous gaps. Without proper protections, Google says the bill could be exploited to weaken privacy on a global scale and potentially even leave the door open to foreign interference.

“Without a stronger definition of ‘systemic vulnerability’, the law could be used to decrease overall user security, by creating backdoors that would break end-to-end encryption and create significant cybersecurity risks, facilitating foreign interference and weakening global user privacy,” it wrote in its submission.

Then there’s the metadata retention piece, which would require companies to hold onto sensitive user data for up to a year. Google’s position is pretty straightforward: storing data on millions of ordinary people who have nothing to do with any crime is an unnecessary risk and a massive overreach.

Google’s requests are pretty direct and it’s asking Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to scrap the secret ministerial orders, drop the metadata logging requirements, and rewrite the bill so it explicitly stops the government from forcing companies to undermine encryption or alter how their products work.

On top of these major tech giants fighting against Bill C-22, we’ve also had major VPN services threaten to leave Canada, if the bill comes into fruition. But despite all of this, the minister in charge says big tech is ‘misunderstanding’ the bill and is possibly open to amendments.