Over the last couple of days there has been a lot of press – both tech and mainstream – about the amended Bell Sympatico user agreement. Language was added about the ability of Sympatico to monitor traffic and report it to the government.

Most commentary speculated that the language was in response to expected draft legislation that would increase the government’s ability to monitor web traffic. Bell denies that.

My first thought was that perhaps Bell made the amendment in order to generate publicity against the pending legislation. After all, ISP’s would rather not deal with it for both philosophical privacy reasons, and the additional costs and headaches it will cause. That would have been an interesting approach to lobby against it.

Even if that was not the intent, it may be the result.

I share David Fraser’s view that at the very least the choice of words was poor.

See David’s Canadian Privacy law blog for a post with more detail about the issue and links to various reports.