The federal government just admitted that they tracked the locations of people in Canada as part of their pandemic response last year.1 Telus gave location data from 33 million devices to the Public Health Agency of Canada over the course of eight months.
Considering the population of Canada, that’s nearly everyone.
Most of us carry our mobile devices wherever we go, meaning this location data is incredibly sensitive and revealing —
it creates a complete picture of where we live, work, travel, and contains all of our intimate associations and affiliations.2 Our laws should not allow a private company to share this kind of information with the federal government without sufficient transparency and accountability measures in place.
Canada needs to update its privacy laws so that information sharing arrangements like this one can be done safely and securely while protecting our fundamental right to privacy. More than 7,000 people in Canada have already signed the petition to #DemandPrivacy from Justin Trudeau and the federal government. Will you join them?
The Public Health Agency of Canada claims that they haven’t accessed any identifiable personal information through the initiative, only de-identified, aggregated location data.
The trouble is we have no proof or legal guarantee that this data was anonymized or even adequately de-identified before being shared with the government. Most importantly, you didn't give Telus permission to share it. It is a well established fact that poorly anonymized cell phone data contains information that makes it very easy to identify and surveil a person, by revealing things like where we live and work.2, 3
When our laws, in both the public and private sector, don’t consider this kind of information personal and deserving of special protections, then something is seriously wrong. Data sharing agreements between private companies like Telus and government bodies can happen safely and securely, but it requires independent oversight and heightened accountability measures that simply don’t exist in Canadian privacy laws right now.
2022 must be the year we win binding privacy protections in Canada.
It’s time to #DemandPrivacy. Together, we can make a difference.
Thanks for all you do,
Bryan at OpenMedia