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In the wake of the site’s launch, one of the more acute worries was around whether the government — and by proxy, the Liberal Party — would be able to access email addresses collected by the website. Vox Pop founder Clifton van der Linden told the Post in December emails were “not stored and cannot be retrieved by anyone, Vox Pop Labs included.”

Amid broader concerns raised by the privacy commissioner, a PCO official told the Post in December that “protecting personal information is something we take very seriously,” while an official from then-minister Maryam Monsef’s office told the Associated Press, “we are confident the steps we are taking through MyDemocracy.ca are protecting personal privacy.”

But it appears the government had second thoughts about those steps.

The initial September 2016 contract between the government and Vox Pop was formally amended Jan. 4, 2017, though it contains a line stating edits were made Dec. 18 — three days after federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien had said publicly he would launch a formal investigation into the survey.

According to Van der Linden, the contract was amended mainly to extend the period for which MyDemocracy.ca would be active (the site was live until Jan. 15). “The modifications to any language around privacy were intended to further clarify the safeguards already in place and which … were already clearly articulated in the MyDemocracy.ca privacy policy,” he said in an email to the Post last week. “No changes were made to the application as a result of the amendment — other than, of course, extending its runtime.”