A friend just provided me with a copy of a recent decision of the Ontario Court of Justice considering the admissibility of information obtained without a warrant from the suspect's internet service provider, Bell. R. v. Cuttell is not on CanLii yet, but I've put a copy here.

The Court concluded there is a reasonable expectation of privacy in your account records, but this expectation can be destroyed by your ISP if their service agreement grants them wide latitude to hand over customer information. The judge accepts that a broadly-worded statement in Bell's contract with the customer might supplant the reasonable expectation of privacy. (I would also question whether a form contract that the customer likey has not read would be enough to mean that subjectively there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.)

In this case, there was no proof brought by the police that the Bell contract applied to this customer so a Charter breach was found.

The Court importantly notes that PIPEDA does not give the police the right to seek information and rejects every crown argument that the police may have had "lawful authority" in the circumstances.

But, in the end, the records were admissible as the police acted in good faith.

More...

Wait a second, I thought contracts cannot override laws in Canada. One example is that you can't contract someone to rob a 7/11 and have the robbery legal. Am I missing something here or is this ruling really screwy?