Canada"s border agency has quietly begun sharing information with U.S. Homeland Security about the thousands of American citizens who cross into Canada each day.
Before long, Washington is expected to provide Ottawa with similar information about Canadians entering the United States.
The exchanges are intended to bolster security and help enforce laws, though advocates for privacy and civil liberties are concerned about the potential for abuse.
Canada says it will use the data for everything from zeroing in on suspected terrorists to ensuring people are actually entitled to social benefits they"re collecting.
Under a 2011 continental security pact, Canada and the United States agreed to set up co-ordinated systems to track the entry and exit information of travellers.
The effort involves exchanging entry information collected from people at the land border — so that data on entry to one country serves as a record of exit from the other.
The data includes the traveller"s name, nationality, date of birth and gender, the country that issued their travel document and the time, date and location of their crossing.
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