The Green Party of Ontario Harvests Private Information
tl;dr: The Green Party of Ontario harvests mailing addresses using unethical means. Under no circumstances should you reward this behaviour with your vote.
I am livid. The Green Party of Ontario sent me junk mail (oh the irony) ordering me to donate money to them and vote for them. Most people would not consider this to be a big deal, except:
I have NEVER consented to receive junk mail or any other form of communication from the Green Party of Ontario.
Unless required to by law, I NEVER give out my home address as a mailing address. To my knowledge the ONLY organizations that should have that address on file are CRA (the Canada Revenue Agency), and elections agencies (such as Elections Ontario). None of these organizations are the Green Party of Ontario. I have a different mailing address that I use for ALL other organizations. I do not even provide my home address to employers. So where did the Green Party of Ontario find it?
Somehow, my personal home address has leaked into a marketing database that the Green Party of Ontario uses. This was added WITHOUT my consent, and they somehow invaded my privacy by mailing me at my home address.
Maybe this still does not seem like a big deal to you. It is a HUGE deal to me. My privacy has been violated. I deliberately avoid giving my home address to people, and the Green Party of Ontario has somehow violated that privacy. I do not know where they got this information and I doubt that they will tell me.
This is the final straw.
Update: I don't think I will be able to make you understand how this is such a privacy violation, but here goes:
Unethical organizations like the GPO put up petitions for you to sign to support certain social causes. They don't care about the social causes; they care about harvesting names and emails. It should not be the case that signing a petition means that you consent to receiving email spam from these organizations, but that is how they interpret this, because they are deeply unethical.
Just because you receive email spam after signing a petition does not mean you have consented to have that data correlated with other data about you that may be available. But these organizations think this is completely legitimate, because they are deeply unethical and as enamoured of the surveillance dystopia as everybody else.
Just because you get your data correlated does not mean you have consented to have these correlations made with semi-confidential data you are obligated to provide by law. But somebody (maybe the government, maybe the GPO) decided that harvesting the personally-identifiable-information of people provided via another means is okay. But these deeply unethical organizations think that is fair game too.
Also consider that the GPO has raided recent information to find my home address. I was not even living at this address during the last provincial election, and I did not consent to have my name and address released to Elections Canada or Elections Ontario on my tax forms. So they found this information out in some other way.
I know that other political parties engage in these kinds of shenanigans. The NDP has harvested my address by other means. I had hoped that the Green Party would have been different, because they make noises about data protection and data privacy. Wrong! They are as bad if not worse. They identified me as a potential Green Party supporter (which is not that difficult, although I did not consent to harvesting of this information) and then they tracked down my home address to send me this junk mail.
I have contacted the Green Party of Ontario about this and demanded an explanation, because if they are going to surveil me they owe me at least that much. I expect they will not respond. Why would they? They are not accountable to anybody. They only care about getting money. So what can I do? I can go on the internet and complain. I can document what happened to me, and point out that this is unethical behaviour, and implore you not to reward such behaviour with your money or your votes.
I am fully aware I sound like a crackpot. I am still livid. This is a big deal -- and not just to paranoid crackpots like me. You should also be concerned (but you aren't, and you won't be until/unless some similar privacy violation happens to you).