Canada’s health agency is facing criticism for extensive cellphone tracking initiatives but hides behind privacy laws to evade disclosure of what data they collected.
Canada’s health agency is facing criticism for withholding thousands of pages of extensive cellphone tracking data under the Access To Information Act.
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) hid behind “commercial confidentiality” as the reason for not disclosing weekly reports derived from cellphone towers across the country throughout the pandemic, as reported by Blacklocks.
The agency “leveraged anonymized, population-aggregated, near real-time mobile device location data to estimate dynamic changes in population mobility patterns across the country,” asserting that “data contains only a unique device ID and there is no information pertaining to users themselves.”
While the agency withheld data under section 20.1 of the Act, unredacted information details that they tracked travel to elementary schools, airports, work and “most common day home locations.”
Topics included:
- Where has time spent away from home changed?
- How have trends in indoor gatherings changed across Canada?
- Trends in non-residential mobility: travel to airports.
This spying initiative, undertaken under the guise of "stopping the spread of COVID-19," effectively infringed on the privacy of millions of mobile phone users. (more...)
The Public Health Agency of Canada refuses to disclose how it spied on Canadians during the pandemic
No comments:
Post a Comment