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Comment by jahfer | Hacker News Reader

The police in Canada are due plenty of scrutiny for how altruistic their departments might be [1]

> The Ontario government ended police access to a COVID-19 database on July 22 after a court challenge by civil rights groups.

> Information released during that legal process revealed Thunder Bay police had searched the database more than 150 times per day, on average, between April 17 and July 22, according to the CCLA. That amounts to 14,800 searches, or a rate ten times the average number of searches by other police forces across the province.

> Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 reported COVID-19 cases during the time the data was available to police.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/thunder-bay-polic...

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Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?

The US is not Canada. Police in Canada need safeguards too, to be sure. It's not even close to the same thing. For every 1 person killed in Canada by police, 100 are killed in America, 10X per capita. People in Canada aren't really scared of the police, certainly not in the way Americans are scared of the police. Police in Canada are part of the community, not paramilitary belligerents.

Nope, the fact that the police was checking the database has nothing to do with the performance of Thunder Bay against COVID 19, their performance is pretty in line with any remote smaller cities across Canada. In fact they tried to know why they were using it so much, and they refuse to answer. It's the lack of accountability that is the problem. May be there was a real reason for them to use it (10x more than any other city???!), but since they refuse to tell people, anyone can guess.

Ok so they have a list of people with COVID. So what?

The accessed names, addresses and medical status. These are all PII and medical information has even higher level of privacy. You want people to use medical services in confidential, it is safer for everyone that if someone suspects that they have an infectious disease that they have the appropriate medical help.

This is why Drs records and the like are very difficult for people to get, even law enforcement.

I get that they shouldn’t have had access to this information. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what harm they could have done with it.

I suspect 150 queries a day is some script, maybe for a dashboard.

Ok, so they flagrantly violated the civil rights of thousands of citizens they've sworn to protect. So what?

No I get they shouldn’t have had access to the data, I’m just at a loss as to what harm they could have done with it. I haven’t heard even so much as a theory truth be told.

What harm is there in your neighbor watching you take a shower?

Absolutely. It would be interesting to know what information was in this database. It doesn't make sense that it was just a list of people. Did it include known connections? Other medical information? Travel history? And why/how was it being used?

> Do you think that the fact Thunder Bay had fewer than 100 COVID cases might have been because of their access to the COVID database, and their ability to enforce the Quarantine Act?

The premise here is that the police force needed to search the COVID database 150 times a day to enforce the quarantine act and that when asked why they were searching so frequently they were afraid to tell the federal government that they were using the queries as a tool for enforcing the law.

I am pretty sceptical of that theory.

Of course since they lost their access more than a month ago there have been a handful of new cases.. so it seems like we also have some empirical evidence that undermines this theory.

I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.

> I'd love to hear a plausible explanation for 150 searches of the COVID-19 database per day in community with just over 100K residents and a police force of around 320 employees for the purposes of genuine police work.

A dashboard that refreshes every 10 minutes.

I’d love to hear a plausible explanation for what malicious thing they could do with that data.

It does not seem very plausible that a small police force built themselves a dashboard that refreshes and then when asked why they were making so many requests by the federal agency didn't explain that they made a dashboard and instead refused to say what they were doing.

A plausible explanation for what they were doing with the data that was malicious was that they were looking up friends and neighbours to gossip about/harass for being COVID-19 positive. It seemed obvious to me that this was the most probable explanation from the start.

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