Public Health Canada accessed location data from 33 million mobile devices to monitor the movement of people during quarantine.
PHAC used location data to assess the effectiveness of isolation measures, which allowed the agency “to understand possible links between population movements in Canada and the spread of COVID-19” , said the spokesperson.
In March, the agency signed a contract with Telus for its Data For Good program to provide “anonymized and aggregated data” on traffic trends in Canada. The contract expired in October and PHAC no longer has access to location data, a spokesperson said.
The agency plans to monitor population movements over the next five years, particularly to address other public health issues such as “other infectious diseases, chronic disease prevention and mental health.”
Privacy advocates have expressed concerns about the long-term implications of this program.
“I think the Canadian public will hear about many other unauthorized surveillance initiatives both before and after the pandemic ends,” said David Lyon, author of Pandemic Surveillance and former director of the Center for Surveillance Research at Queens University, according to an email.
Lyon warned that the PHAC “uses the same ‘reassuring’ language used by national security agencies, for example, without mentioning the possibility of re-identifying data that has been ‘de-identified’.
“Basically, of course, cellular data can be used for tracking.”
Analysis of mobility data “helps advance public health goals,” a PHAC spokesperson said. The results were regularly communicated to provinces and territories through an advisory committee dedicated to “public education, planning and policy development,” the spokesperson said.
This data is also used for the COVID Trends portal, a dashboard that provides a summary of traffic trends.
By the way: Canada is working on law to help protect privacy
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