Privacy-Respecting Justification & Compliance Summary
CanuckDUCK Research Corp. | April 2025
❖ Purpose
CanuckDUCK employs a one-way, local hashing system that accepts Social Insurance Numbers (SINs) solely as a means to establish the uniqueness of a civic identity record. This record is not linked to government services, financial records, or any real-world credential—only to an anonymized, cryptographic identity used in our civic engagement ecosystem.
❖ Legislative Compliance Summary
While the Employment Insurance Act restricts the issuance and usage of SINs to authorized government programs, it permits their use for data processing purposes (Auditor General Report, 1.7–1.8). Our system never stores or transmits SINs. Instead, it:
- Accepts a SIN input once during the identity registration phase.
- Validates the SIN externally via one of the following:
- Third-party verification services (gov.ca, etc.)
- Snail mail credential validation
- Anonymous mailing challenge (proof of access to a mailing address)
- Generates a unique, non-reversible hash, which becomes the civic identity anchor.
- Discards the original SIN input immediately after hashing.
At no point is the SIN used as a credential, login mechanism, or tied to any account accessible by users or staff.
❖ Differentiation from Government Usage
Element
Government SIN Process
CanuckDUCK Process
Role of SIN
Credential for service entitlement
Proof of uniqueness only
Identity verification
Performed by HRDC (with weaknesses)
External or physical mail-based
Storage
Centralized and permanent
Not stored or transmitted
Reuse prevention
None; multiple SINs can exist
Enforced via 1-to-1 hash constraint
Fraud vulnerability
High (19M SINs issued with no proof pre-1976)
Low; validation required before token issuance
Legal claim
Entitlement to government services
No legal claim—civic participation only
❖ Core Principle: Trust Without Retention
The use of a SIN enables the creation of a single civic record per individual, but we never retain the identifier itself. The process is strictly about ensuring that:
- No one person can create multiple identities, and
- Every identity belongs to a real person (verified externally).
If CanuckDUCK performs identity validation directly (e.g., by snail mail), it does so only to confirm that the individual has access to the mailing address they submitted—not to validate the SIN itself.
❖ Privacy & Security Considerations
- All civic tokens (Wisdom, Solidarity, Stature) are anonymized and detached from real-world identifiers.
- Our system never displays, logs, or transmits SINs.
- Civic identities generated from a SIN are not legally or financially binding.
- Any use of third-party verification services is governed by strict isolation and audit logging policies.
❖ Conclusion
Our limited, controlled use of the SIN is fully aligned with its definition as a data-processing file number and is far more conservative than even historical government practices. It exists purely to uphold integrity, fairness, and one-person-one-voice participation in a civic context—and never for identification, entitlement, or surveillance.