OTTAWA—Rogers Communications saw a marked decrease in police requests for Canadians’ data in 2015, a year after the Supreme Court put serious restrictions on law enforcements’ ability to access personal information without a warrant.

The company reported 86,328 requests for their customers’ information in 2015, a more than 50 per cent drop since Rogers’ first started publicly reporting law enforcement requests in 2013.

Dave Watt, Rogers’ chief privacy officer, said he thinks the main reason for the decline is the company no longer hands over customer information without a warrant — except in emergency circumstances.

“I think that would be the biggest reason. I don’t think that crime has diminished to that extent,” Watt said in an interview Thursday. “It really is the fact that the system, the process, is now really well-understood.”

The Star reported in 2014 that law enforcement agencies had asked nine of Canada’s largest telecommunications and Internet providers to hand over their customers’ data 1.2 million times in 2011.

Police routinely asked for what is known as “basic subscriber information” — name, address, Internet protocol address, telephone number — without a warrant.

While basic subscriber information sounds innocuous, often called “phone book” data by police, privacy advocates have warned it can be used to paint a detailed picture of Canadians’ activities both online and offline.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in June 2014 that law enforcement and security agencies must obtain a search warrant to request that information, except in emergency situations.

“Now (police) have a clearly understood process, and they follow it. We work fairly well with them,” Watt said.

Police agencies have long warned that as more and more of Canadians’ daily activities are connected to the Internet, they need “modernized” tools to address the growing threat of cyber crime.

So-called “lawful access” legislation has led to nasty debates between the previous Conservative government and privacy and civil liberty activists.

Internal briefing documents prepared for Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale show the issue remains top-of-mind for Canada’s law enforcement agencies.

A November briefing note on the challenges of combating cyber crime and terrorism note that the Supreme Court’s decision has added a “heavy administrative and financial burden” to some investigations.

The document, obtained by the Star under access to information law and heavily censored, also points to what authorities are calling a “chicken and egg” scenario — where a warrant is required to obtain basic subscriber information, but the same information is required to obtain a warrant in the first place.

Still, according to Rogers, law enforcement used search warrants 74,977 times in 2015 — a number virtually unchanged from the two previous years.

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Goodale’s briefing note state that Public Safety Canada continues to work with police agencies to address issues around lawful access.

“This work will need to be advanced carefully as legislative solutions have failed in the past,” the document states. “Beyond any legislative solution, it may be necessary to consider other options, such as modifications to, or the development of a regulatory framework.”

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