Canada's public health agency admits it tracked mobile devices during lockdown | Hacker News Reader

Canada's public health agency admits it tracked mobile devices during lockdown

nationalpost.com

242 pointsdiequik143 comments

It’s very disingenuous for privacy advocates to imply that the Canadian government created new surveillance powers during the pandemic.

These mobile network tracking datasets have been commercially available long beforehand. The public health agency simply put them to use to get accurate measurements of how much lockdown restrictions were actually translating into reduced movement.

Public health agencies have long been entrusted with handling personal information that is much more sensitive than movement data, so if these privacy advocates want to be taken seriously, they should do some genuine research on how this data gets used instead of simply suggesting that the public health agency must be distrusted by default.

Yes. Unfortunately over the last several years the national post has shown its right wing bias to an increasing extent. It's not usually as obvious about it as a Fox News, but the intent of pieces like this is clear.

Wait, the GP is claiming expanded new surveillance behaviors should be normalized. This is like Fox news.

It seems like GP is claiming that this is not new, and also does not represent meaningfully expanded surveillance.

Yeah. Why is trusting government supposed to be the default? Any organization with power should be continually distrusted, required to constantly and endlessly prove itself. In a democratic situation, the price of power is the responsibility to prove yourself trustworthy and competent enough to hold it. The whole point is that power is granted contingent to the will of a people for the good of the people.

You should never trust government. If your democracy is working, you can sometimes trust that government actions were good and competent after the fact. Trusting up front is abdication of your responsibility to guard against abuses as a citizen. Every tiny step towards surveillance and acquisition of data that can be abused should be resisted and assumed to be motivated by the worst possible incentive.

It's up to the agency or bureau to prove, up front, to the satisfaction of representatives and citizenry that a tool or power is necessary.

"But it's not illegal" is a weasel move, and heads should roll.

If your government is untrustworthy the correct action is to replace the government not simply accept this as normal.

I'd like to know how we can vote out the NSA.

Same. Also, I am not a US citizen that is not living in the USA. How can I affect US policy that is affecting me?

Despite downvotes this comment is very true. A modern constitution (the foundation of a country) is all about citizen rights to counter power, if you think government should just be trusted without actions to require more safeguard and transparency then you are pretty much waving your rights, and you probably don't deserve them.

How did you come to that conclusion? The GP only states that the public health agency used already-available information, I don't see where they express any opinion on whether the availability of that data is a good thing or not.

It's a fair criticism that substantially all of Canada's non-CBC media is owned by fairly right-leaning American entities (at least, right-leaning by Canadian standards). I'm not sure this is something that even most Canadians are aware of. National Post is owned by Postmedia, which is in turn 66% owned by American media conglomerate Chatham Asset Management.

I'm not claiming that has anything to do with this specific article - I don't know enough to - just hoping to provide some color around parents comment.

With that in mind, I think this is a completely reasonable use of anonymized data by PHAC and the article does feel heavily sensationalized. I assume all the major insurers in the US are doing this - and far worse - but being private entities we have zero insight into it whatsoever. I would much rather PHAC have this data than a federated Kaiser-type entity that has my financial and physical health by the short-and-curlies so to speak.

There's a lot of interesting things for HN to talk about, but for the general public this should be a non-story.

So you're pretty much okay with surveillance?

That's absolutely not what OP said.

Surveillance was already happening at scale and being put to use for whatever nefarious purpose. As long as it wasn't public, very few people cared. Now that the data is used for public good (helping determine health policy), media and activists jump on the bandwagon because, duh, "government surveillance = bad" knee-jerk.

Public servants putting high-tech tools to work to get people their tax money's worth? It's actually the _only_ ethical use for this collected data!

I disagree. It crosses a line and it is one step closer to the rcmp just tracking everyone regardless of legality. Most Canadians are not aware their cell phone providers are selling their location as you say. We are unhappy about that too and would be just as unhappy it was used by anyone for any reason. It is very easy to deannonymise someone given that it would be trivial to see the home location a person is at most times then see where they go to. If they were doing this there should be a mechanism to opt out to avoid abuse of the system. With the Snowden leaks we already saw abuses happening. Workers tracking their lovers. It would be very trivial for someone to look at their girlfriends location simply by watching that location in which she lives and then following her signal even if it is anonymize. We were never told about this or how it would be safeguarded from abuse. This is bullshit despite what you and others here on HN are fighting against our disdain.

First of all, the reason people view the government using the data as different is that the government has coercive powers (and a monopoly on Violence) that other actors don’t.

Secondly, the government making use of an unethical or nefarious practice only serves to legitimize it, and make it harder to roll back.

Lastly, if everything was above board, why be forthright about the use the employment of such data sets?

> First of all, the reason people view the government using the data as different is that the government has coercive powers (and a monopoly on Violence) that other actors don’t.

But that's not really applicable here because they're not using their "coercive powers" to get the data. They're getting data that anyone else could get by paying enough money.

But some advertiser can’t put you in prison

Don't be fooled by the government vs private sector dichotomy. State may have a "monopoly on physical violence" but dutifully lends said forces to protect private assets. In return, corporations let intelligence agencies tap into their data streams to scan for "interesting patterns". It's one system.

Also, advertisers _do_ maintain a prison of the mind by entertaining futile, elusive, ever-shifting goals to divert energy that could be spent in trying to change things.

> Surveillance was already happening at scale and being put to use for whatever nefarious purpose. As long as it wasn't public, very few people cared. Now that the data is used for public good

Why do multiple person believe the issue is that it's the public sector that use it? I didn't know the data was available. The issue is definitely not who use it.

Not surprising.

The reporting here is National Post, which is essentially the Fox News of Canada. They're trying to attack the Liberal government with this story.

That really isn't accurate. The National Post is Canadian center-right, but it's generally a pro-business perspective rather than a socially conservative perspective, as it inherited much of its readership from the Financial Post. A better American analogue would be the Wall Street Journal.

As for the GP comment, I think it's always fair to be more skeptical of government access to data given the government's unique powers and access to other sources of information for potential correlation or deanonymization. They should have to prove that this can't pose a privacy concern, not "move fast and break things".

That was true maybe 10 years ago but the Post has been shockingly radicalized in recent years - now a home for climate change denial and other wingnuts.

G&M is the new Post, Post is the new Sun, and Sun is the new Weekly World News.

>> it's always fair to be more skeptical of government access to data given the government's...

I'm not willing to take accept this as an absolute regardless of context. You could also make the case that government is accountable, given democracy, some level of transparency, oversight etc.

There are quite a few private actors with the ability to correlate, deanonymize, etc. If a dataset is commercially available, it isn't private. Maybe it should not exist as a public dataset at all. If someone has to prove that a dataset does not pose a privacy risk, it should be whoever is selling it... or anyone who touches it.

The idea that google, pfifer & citibank can access a dataset... without oversight or accountability, but a public health agency can't because privacy... it seems ridiculous to me.

Many years ago I had to take mandatory privacy training for some contracting I was doing for a non-profit (open source case management for homeless shelters in Toronto).

It was actually quite informative. And what I got out of it is that I "trust" the public / government institutions in Canada a lot more than I do private ones. Yes, they're often incompetent. Yes, I'm sure there are rules broken. But years of working in the private sector and seeing how cavalier user's PII was treated vs the legal protections actually expected of government agencies... There are very stringent regulations in place on the who/what/where of data that comes into public agencies.

There is a tone in this thread, from some, of an intrinsic expectation of malice by the state. But I actually have more expectation of responsibility by layers of governance here than I do of private entities, which are generally further outside of my control or visibility, often keeping my data in American data centres, etc.

After working for Canada's Defence, I certainly don't trust how they protect military members' medical data. It's on a separate network which requires asymmetric crypto for access, but the actual data has yet to be encrypted. I think that's unsafe, considering how it's common practice now.

>> but the actual data has yet to be encrypted.

You probably don't want to look too closely at how medical records are being kept in the private sector. Encryption is supposed to be a rule but the exceptions and loopholes mean very little is properly encrypted.

Most medical privacy rules can be met by implementing drive-level encryption, transparent encryption that protects only against hard drives being stolen but does nothing to prevent data extraction from a live drive. A small medical office can probably get away with simply turning on bitlocker.

I trust the moral judgement of the average government worker more than I do the moral judgement of the average Big Tech worker or CEO, but I trust the technical competence of the Big Tech workers more.

I expect the government to try to protect my information from everyone except for themselves, but fail to account for what I consider basic security practices. I expect Big Tech to be safer from malicious hacks and tech exploits, but they'll sell my info to the highest bidder.

Basically one is an unlocked but well-guarded warehouse and one is a warehouse that requires 50 keys to open and is on the ocean floor but the warehouse company also runs key-stamping and submarine businesses.

Sure, I agree, I think you basically restated what my proposition.

The key thing is that we can fix the technical problems in government. But the privacy failures of the private sector are built into the predominant business models of the tech sector itself and harder to fix. (Full disclosure, I worked in ads for many years before walking away in disgust)

I should say that -- coming off a 10 year stint at Google -- Google takes PII super seriously and does a very good job of protecting it technically and organizationally. I'm sure most other BigTechs do, too. But clearly this data, people's private data and models of behaviour etc based on that, is a major source of revenue in our industry.

Another point on this topic: Governments and do act with malice to their populations in some situations, but in general Canadians have higher expectations of, and higher trust for, their government than Americans seem to on the whole. Hence our single payer health system and the classic motto of 'Peace, Order, and Good Government' which characterizes our commonwealth vs the 'Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness' etc. of the American Republic.

To be fair, that only applies to big tech and some fraction of non-tech companies. The rest have a fairly cavalier attitude towards computer security.

How do you think the circumstances and motivations of a government employee differ from those of a CEO?

>These mobile network tracking datasets have been commercially available long beforehand.

Hopefully not. Canada has fairly strict privacy legislation.

Maybe the raw datasets aren't available, but another commenter has mentioned that they're willing to sell aggregated/anonymized data to anyone who's willing to pay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29680578

It is in fact a Toronto company that invented the technique of tracking pandemics with cellphone data, after the 2003 SARS outbreak, and it is being used in a number of cities:

https://thelogic.co/news/ai-firm-bluedot-helping-toronto-pub...

https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/news/bluedot-coronavirus-pri...

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/coronavirus-outbreak-comput...

There is never a good time to stand up to incremental tyranny.

By design

You make this seem as if it’s no big deal at all. If that is true why wasn’t the Canadian health agency open and transparent about it from the beginning?

Perhaps people don’t want public health agencies tracking their movement? Perhaps the Canadian health agency knew people wouldn’t like it and decided not to disclose it publicly. An omission of fact is fundamentally equivalent to an outright lie.

Which then begs the question of what else they aren’t disclosing.

Why should people trust a lying public health agency?

>> Perhaps people don’t want public health agencies tracking their movement?

Sure, nobody wants the government to track their movements. But lots of people are perfectly happy with government doing practical contact tracing of covid patients. The only difference is wording. Personally, I very much want to know if I the guy sitting beside me on that flight/bus was carrying omicron. If that means a government agency occasionally looks though cellphone records, so be it. I actually trust my government to do such things.

Unlike Americans, Canadians generally give their government much more credit in these areas. A Canadian generally trusts that such information isn't going to be handed over to police without good cause. And they know that the police have better things to be doing that tracking people for petty offences. And even if caught for some crime, Canadians aren't subject to the US prison industry. At each layer their is a greater level of trust in government. The net effect is that these stories don't really bother much of anyone.

Contact tracing involves some degree of consent, but this is dragnet surveillance without your knowledge.

That’s fine. Different people from different countries with different laws can have different opinions about surveillance.

But that just further begs the question of why the Canadian public health agency wasn’t open and honest about it.

> I very much want to know if I the guy sitting beside me on that flight/bus was carrying omicron. If that means a government agency occasionally looks though cellphone records, so be it.

Put me down for definitely not wanting this. I'd rather have omicron.

Contact tracing isn't about you. If you were on that flight beside that guy then you now likely have it either way. Tracing is about allowing you to know that you have been exposed so that you can prevent yourself from spreading it to other people. It is about sacrificing some personal privacy in order to protect other people.

This hasn’t been hidden at all. Here’s an announcement from a year ago about researchers in Canada using cellphone data: https://munkschool.utoronto.ca/research-articles/mobility-an...

Independent researchers is not the same as a government health agency. Presumably these independent researchers don’t also have your private health data.

And again, if it’s not big deal why wasn’t the Canadian public health agency transparent about it from the beginning?

Not sure why you are nitpicking. The point is that it’s no secret that this data is out there any available to anyone. Here’s an article about Toronto Public Health using cellphone data, also from a year ago.

https://thelogic.co/news/ai-firm-bluedot-helping-toronto-pub...

That's all fine and dandy; except what every comment here fails to challenge is "how did the data make actual decisions?"

Because as a Canadian, living in a prairie province, all the COVID-19 measures certainly didn't indicate any sort of intense number crunching took place. "No serving drinks past 11", "50% store capacity", "gathering limited to 15 people", etc etc.... All numbers that appear to be just like any other mandate - arbitrarily chosen in the moment.

I can’t speak for your specific province, but throughout this pandemic Canadian researchers have been studying how well each restriction works to feed back into more precise decisions during the next wave.

It’s easy to find it if you look: https://scholar.google.ca/scholar?hl=en&q=canada+covid+mobil...

It's good the studies take place; but cursory glance that's 'diagnostic analytics' more than 'predictive' or 'prescriptive analytics'. Tracking data should be used to get ahead of these things; not to augment post-case studies.

There have been several waves of covid, and each time new restrictions were put into place, they were adjusted based on the studies which showed what worked in the previous wave.

Again, I can’t speak for your provincial government, but in most of Canada, each successive lockdown was more finely tuned than the preceding one, thanks to the data that was collected.

There’s always a balance to be struck between what the actual science says and what will be manageable as law.

Like, sure the science could say that if the temperature range is between 10-15c you can safely gather with 20, 15-17c only 15, and 17c+ only 10. But that’s probably not the policy that is going out to the public because it’s too hard for people to actually live with and enforce.

Plus most of the purely scientific considerations were bastardized when they came in contact with political and economic considerations before being made into policy.

It's interesting, as I've heard the same reasoning with taxation too. We can have all these sophisticated statistical models, risk models, and so forth; yet what ultimately gets produced is a basic tax bracket step scale that (hopefully) anyone can understand.

So is there actually academic research on how to best 'dummy down' complex models for society? Or is it end of day the actuaries, statisticians, and mathematicians tell policy makers their findings and some polysci major just approximates from there?

Those decisions were made by your provincial government, not Health Canada.

Health Canada may be utilizing the data, but what good does it do if they don't share results analysis with the provinces to make informed decisions?

I'm sure they are. But don't fool yourself into thinking the provincial leaders are making decisions based on data. Most of what was done by provincial governments during lockdown was based on political calculations, not data.

Amazingly a large % of the electorate seems to blame Trudeau for these actions. The feds don't have jurisdiction on this issue. Lockdowns etc and their poor methods of implementation (curfews, letting big businesses stay open but shuttering small businesses, etc) are the result of provincial governments.

When COVID is over, the state will not willingly dismantle the new surveillance and information propagation/censorship systems it has built. The loss in liberty from COVID will make 9/11 and the Patriot Act look like a drop in the bucket. I used to think that as people who were more familiar with these issues we might be able to do something. It feels now more like we just won't be anesthetized when the doctor gets the hacksaw out.

That’s really quite hyperbolic, given that it’s the cell provider’s anonymized aggregate data, for sale to anyone who cares to pay.

Many states and nations built databases to track who is vaccinated, who is infected, and who their contacts are. They will not go away, and they can be used to track anything.

If this were the case, it should be a very big story.

But it's anonymoized data, they are looking at behavioural patterns.

This is probably a really smart thing to do.

>given that it’s the cell provider’s anonymized aggregate data, for sale to anyone who cares to pay.

I heard that's the case for the US, but is that the case for canada as well?

Apparently, yes "The Insights platform was widely used even prior to the pandemic," [1]

I found [1] from the telus site describing this at [2]. The data platform is [3].

They say that they aggregate the data into large buckets, but I haven't figured out exactly what that means.

[1] https://iapp.org/news/a/teluss-data-for-good-wins-hpe-iapp-p...

[2] https://www.telus.com/en/about/privacy/data-for-good

[3] https://www.telus.com/en/business/medium-large/enterprise-so...

That's the problem. Agencies use this vague, meaningless language when what you really need to understand the implications and scrutinize them are the sordid technical details.

> censorship systems

what censorship system is installed as a pandemic measure by the gov't?

You cannot post anything on major social media if it contradicts what the establishment broadly regards as true. Best case scenario your post is removed, worse case scenario your account is suspended, worst case scenario the police come knocking at your door (e.g. Australia).

Certain topics now get you a big warning banner and maybe a shadowban on major social networks, and they'll openly admit as much. If that's not at the government's request then it's only because those social networks pre-empted the government.

But that's not an innovation caused by the pandemic. Weren't those labels introduced in response to the spoutings of the previous POTUS, even before Covid-19 was a thing? They may have been used to combat misinformation during the 2016 election campaign, I don't recall exactly. But the mechanism definitely existed before this virus appeared.

There was certainly talk about them in the aftermath of the 2016 US elections, but I don't remember them actually being introduced until Covid-19; certainly they weren't used anywhere near this widely.

Power is rarely given up by direct request, if ever. Every inch that is given is one that must be fought tooth and nail to be reclaimed.

The silver lining of the past two years of incredible government overreach is an awakening in the minds of the common man of what’s possible if not for the push back of the determined. I’m not sure how this will all end, but I don’t see anymore widespread lockdowns or a total surveillance State taking control. At least not in the USA. There’s enough of us to reject that outright.

Except the thing that got everyone riled up is common sense activities like wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Where were those people at when bush was taking away their civil liberties? Waving their flags. I can at least get behind the folks like you who have a consistent view, but I definitely don't think that's 95% and I definitely think you are very mistaken that people are suddenly going to start trying to stop the other parts of the surveillance state (aka the actual bad parts, not the wear a mask part).

Exactly this. I had the misfortune of experiencing TSA security recently and it's still 99% bullshit security theatre from the 9/11 era. Covid stuff was just a sideshow.

This is been a really depressing reality check for me.

People are happy to let their important rights and liberties be taken away, as long as it's not too overt or sudden. But don't you dare make me wear a mask indoors during a respiratory virus pandemic!!

What's even more frustrating is that these people generally aren't "stupid".

That’s not where the line should be drawn. There is a small group dismayed at every erosion of liberties and drumming for foreign war, and then there are two large groups who take turns eroding the liberties spending munitions and using the other party as the excuse to have their turn doing it.

There's something to this. All too many people are okay with government overreach, and even tyranny, as long as it's in the name of some cause that they personally favour. It's only when this power is used in opposition to their views that it gets to be a problem. That goes for both wings of the American Demopublican Uniparty.

Masks are an undue burden at this point and it's reasonable to oppose them. I'm personally going to choose the state I move to based on opposition to masks, maybe Florida or Texas.

The infrastructure wasn't built for COVID. It was already all there far before. The sad truth is that privacy wise we lost barely any privacy because it was already all gone. The only risk is giving another excuse for legitimisation.

The general risk is there and I think politicians should talk more about it, but I'm wary that your statement is too broad.

Why are you concerned about your government trying to stop the spread of COVID, but hand over, willy nilly, the data to Apple and Google so they can sell you NFTs, microwaves and cars, and then also sell that data to others?

The government is using generic tower data avaiable to any number of sources.

It's like collect car traffic data to improve stoplight efficiency.

This is what we want them to be doing.

They should be transparent about it and contextualize it, but this program I'm fine with.

The lack of constitutional grounds for the 'curfews' is a bit discouraging, I'm shocked to see what's going in in Australia, they need some laws there.

Uh, this is the normal capitalist surveillance that is the business model of the kind of unicorns people here on hn want to found or work at.

The Canadian public health authorities just bought access to existing corporate databases.

Do you really think public health is less worthy of using this data than marketing and sales?

The government has the power to imprison people and can even give themselves the right to put people to death, regardless of the legality of the death penalty in any particular jurisdiction. So yes, I want them held to much higher and stricter standards than the folks at Dunkin' Donuts trying to find a better way to get me to buy coffee from them.

20 years ago one guy failed to light his shoe on fire and to this day we’re still taking our shoes off at the airport.

> In March, the Agency awarded a contract to the Telus Data For Good program to provide “de-identified and aggregated data” of movement trends in Canada. The contract expired in October, and PHAC no longer has access to the location data, the spokesperson said.

So it's anonymized movement data that CSE (probably) already had complete access to. I'd like to know more about how granular the data is. Obviously if it's too granular it just points to your home and the grocery store, which isn't very anonymous. If it is a log of city-to-city travel, then it should be fairly hard to pin point any specific individual from the dataset.

I think Apple and Google's device-to-device contact tracing is a much better approach to the locality problem, and it is also in use in Canada (opt-in).

What does "de-identified" mean, precisely? Does it simply remove the legal name but retain the uniqueness?

Ie, can they tell that one person traveled from Victoria, to Vancouver, to the Wetsuweten territory; but not know who, specifically, that person is?

That's unnecessary. The information they are collecting at travel points (trains/planes/ports) with these vaccine passports they already have that information.

De-identification can mean a lot of things, but when dealing with location histories one at a time, few of them help very much. How many people take the same route that you do to work? How many do it at the same time you went and stopped at the same store on the way back at the same time you did? How many took the same vacations? How many live in the same building? The intersection of these sets very rapidly approaches one person.

The question is the extent to which the aggregation obscures all this.

How about who had access to it? Did they watch their gf movements while she was out? Will we be seeing down the road that it was abused and a jealous lover tracked their partner? This whole thing has already been played out in history and we know this is a bad thing. I am shocked HN crowd is defending this behaviour this time. This is not something we should accept as a society.

…or that a person (anonymous unique id) traveled to 123 somewhere road. And stayed there from 8pm through 10am.

And the tax records also show a man by the name of Joe who put the same address as their primary residence.

Viola! De-anonymization.

Okay, but who has access to the full PII of tax records?

If the government really wanted deanonymized data, they could just get it directly. Instead, they’re intentionally enforcing a degree of anonymity. Part of that could include preventing those with access to tax records access to this location data as well.

There is no way to anonymize movement data.

Anyone telling you that location data is "de-identified" or "anonymized" is lying to you.

Ok but what on earth good is identifiable data to PHAC? Why would PHAC try and de-anonymize this data? What could they possibly do with it? Canadian government entities tend to be well intentioned even if not always the most efficient.

When, not if, they have a data breach, those records are trivially deanonymized by malicious third parties. They shouldn't have the data, they don't need it, and storing it long term is completely unnecessary.

Collection of private data is only ever appropriate directly from an individual with informed consent, with strict and mutually agreed upon limits on how long it can be stored and the uses to which it can be put. Permanent or long-term data retention should be rare and have intense oversight. Almost everything else should be ephemeral on the level of minutes to hours.

Legislation will catch up after this bites us in the ass, and the longer it takes, the worse it's going to be.

> They shouldn't have the data, they don't need it, and storing it long term is completely unnecessary.

I mean, I completely disagree. If the job of a public health agency isn't to use anonymous data to make informed decisions about public health what on earth is their job?

They don't need location tracking. It's inherently not anonymous.

That’s a good opinion haha, but I do trust them to make the determination around what existing data set they need to be effective. That’s why we have them.

There is no way to anonymize movement data.

Anyone telling you that location data is "de-identified" or "anonymized" is lying to you.

My point isn't that it's not possible to de-anonymize the data in general, but rather that this organization doesn't have datasets that they can correlate it with, they don't have any incentive to do so, they don't have any mandate to do so, and this data is also available to anyone willing to cut a check.

My point is they are using data to make data-driven decisions and do their jobs. This is the kind of thing you want from a government. So again, I ask.

If the job of a public health agency isn't to use anonymous data to make informed decisions about public health what on earth is their job?

Other parts of the Canadian federal government would love this data as an aid in criminal investigations, up to and including fishing expeditions against innocent people. Police are not known for willingly making their own jobs harder in the name of preserving civil rights, as the police-worldview is that police are inherently trustworthy.

Once they have the dataset, they can legally volunteer it to RCMP or CSIS. (CSIS may/probably already has it, but we don't have an Eduardo Snodienne yet.)

Probably a solid Edward Snowed-in joke in there somewhere : )I do agree, although I suspect that give this dataset is available to anyone willing to cut a cheque, that RCMP and CSIS probably already have it.

Canadian here. This publication is one of the radical and sensational ones from my experience. Not somewhere I would get my news from.

Thanks for the context.

I wish there were an easy way for outsiders to know this. I have an intuition for reliable vs. sensational sources in specific places and subjects, but am mostly in the dark beyond that.

The GP makes a gross mischaracterization. It's a centre to centre-right publication and is among the most popular in our country. I'm not sure what axe they have to grind with NP, but it's resoundingly clear they're not replying in good faith.

Canadian here, and this is just false.

There's nothing remotely 'radical' about the NP.

The National Post is has an editorial bias, but the only source that the publication could be considered 'radical' would be the editorial letters from Conrad Black, which are not 'news'.

Otherwise, it's a welcome bit of information from the insufferably poor lack of perspective offered by the CBC, the national broadcaster.

I wouldn't trust the 'National Post' as a 'single source' of news, it's not broad enough, however, it's an important part of the fairly limited diaspora of news in Canada.

The evidence for this is right in the story: however ultimately benign this issue is, it's an incredibly important bit of information for Canadians to have, and the CBC is not giving us this information.

Moreover, the article itself is clear, well written, well sourced and I can't fathom how someone would really characterize it as clickbait other than if they misread the headline.

So you can have a possibly sensational headline (arguably) from a privately owned news paper that has to earn a profit, or, no news at all because the national broadcaster, The CBC, apparently doesn't think you need to know that the government uses this data.

I'm thankful for the NP, and there's a dearth of good journalism in Canada.

The Globe and Mail is equally behind a paywall, the Toronto Star and Sun are rubbish, the Montreal papers are very Quebec focused - and so it's slim pickings otherwise.

> The CBC apparently doesn't think you need to know that the government uses this data.

Canadian here. I agree completely with the CBC. This is one of the least interesting non-stories I have seen in years.

"Public health agency does job - uses aggregated, anonymous statistics to see how people move and interact in hopes of improving public health." Oh no. Anyways.

> I'm thankful for the NP, and there's a dearth of good journalism in Canada.

Well, there is the CBC :)

This is 100% a legitimate news story.

In an era of increased government surveillance and arbitrary encroaching powers, this is exactly what news is.

That the government is apparently using the data anonymized for COVID research etc. is obviously important.

Honestly it's a bit odd to think there are people who would just 'look the other way' and trust that the system without information.

Thankfully, we have a news diaspora and other journalist can monitor the program and follow the story with 'access to personal information requests' from them, Telus etc..

> In an era of increased government surveillance and arbitrary encroaching powers, this is exactly what news is.

The government did not create any new powers here, this dataset was available for a long time, and the public health agency is now using it in service of its goal - furthering the public health of Canadians.

> That the government is apparently using the data anonymized for COVID research etc. is obviously important.

Why is anonymous data important to you? I don't mean this in a provocative way, I'm genuinely curious. I'd honestly submit de-anonymized data to PHAC if asked. Seems like a worthwhile mission.

I have no idea how PHAC could harm me or anyone else by knowing I went down to the Loblaws on MacArthur in Vanier this morning.

> Honestly it's a bit odd to think there are people who would just 'look the other way' and trust that the system without information.

I think it's fair - important even - to ask the questions, but if you find the answer is a non-story, then don't publish it or at least publish it without a negative, suspicious framing. Once they found the data was anonymous and being used under existing authority exactly for the thing it was supposed to be, it's sort of a move along, nothing to see here moment. I know that doesn't sell papers for the grandparent company in New Jersey.

What's the significance of them being headquartered in NJ?

Foreign ownership of media claiming to be domestic is always worth questioning. Especially when the politics of that other country are quite different than your own, but they’re close enough to meddle in yours. Doubly so when they're 10x bigger in terms of population and significantly more influential - and are also mutually each other's #1/#2 largest trading partners.

The old Trudeau (Sr.) quote comes to mind.

> "Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt," said the late Pierre Trudeau.

News sources are always a flashpoint for nationalism and I think, and American media has quite a reputation for sensationalism and the "24 hour news cycle." It's also not like the US is some disinterested party in Canadian politics; I wouldn't care so much if Postmedia were owned by say the Swiss or even the Qataris.

This is not 'foreign ownernship'.

Postmedia is a Canadian News Agency it has nothing to do with the US. It's ownership (broadly), origins, headquarters, management, staff, operations, sales, revenue, even stock listing etc. - everything is Canadian. That there might be some incorporation somewhere is notable, but not important.

Trudeau Sr. is not a reliable source of opinion on this, he hugely influenced the CBC charter and re-wrote it in his own parties ideology, influencing a generation of Canadians with his political ideals.

I'd honestly submit de-anonymized data to PHAC if asked

Sure, and that's your prerogative. But how come you get to decide that because you don't see a problem, that no one should see a problem? Privacy is not about secrecy, it is about agency. Regardless of how it's framed, usage of involuntarily collected data is a violation of agency.

I agree that this is a non-story as far as the Canadian Health Authority is concerned. But the data collection itself is not a non-story, so I'm willing to let the story stand because of that. Isn't it funny how "pro-business" (read: sociopathic) news outlets will defend the need for businesses to violate your agency at every turn, but scream bloody murder when a government institution uses that same commercially-harvested data in order to fulfill their function?

> I agree that this is a non-story as far as the Canadian Health Authority is concerned. But the data collection itself is not a non-story, so I'm willing to let the story stand because of that.

I think we can agree on that!

> "The government did not create any new powers here,"

The government did not 'create any new powers' to lock us in our homes after 8m pm.

The point is, governments around the world are creating new surveillance programs.

This is a new surveillance program.

Ergo, it's newsworthy.

"Why is anonymous data important to you? "

Because we've spend 5000 years trying to overcome state surveillance. The reason we have to have a Constitution, where the first line talks about 'Freedom To Assemble'.

... and governments lie.

Are they using the Digital Passport data as well?

Is it really anonymous, and to what degree?

What kind of oversight is there on the researchers?

In the end, if it's above board, I'm fine with it, but there needs to be oversight, 'journalism' is part of that, and the state sponsored entity, the CBC, should be the first place to contemplate the story.

It's not a non-story, and it's not published with negative or suspicious framing, and even if it were, that's within perogative.

> Canadian here. I agree completely with the CBC. This is one of the least interesting non-stories I have seen in years.

By letting the National Post pick up the story, they let the National Post set the tone of the story. The National Post decided to focus most of their attention on the privacy implications of the government purchasing the data. They decided to ignore the privacy implications of private entities collecting and reselling the data. While they did mention why the government purchased the data, they virtually ignore how it was being used.

I'm not going to claim that the CBC would have handled the story any better. Quite frankly, CBC's research is often shoddy and agenda driven. Yet it would likely have been enough to fill in some of the gaping holes in the National Post story.

(On second thought, the National Post story is more of an opinion piece. Perhaps a quarter of the article can be described as news.)

National Post is the loudest voice for climate change denial in Canada. That alone should be enough to consider it disreputable.

Canadian here, as well. This comment is a bit radical and sensational. While the National Post may lean slightly centre/right [1], it is still a respected publication.

[1] https://ground.news/interest/national-post

Radical? Not really, though it is definitely more sensational, and I would stay as far away as I could from their opinion pieces.

The National Post radical.???

It is more tasteless and characterless than the sawdust served at an IKEA cafeteria. Nothing about it is radical. They raison d’être is to defend the English Canadian way to do government (therefore literally the opposite of radical).

“Radical” NP opposes Quebec’s nationalist laws including the anti-muslim laws, laws forcing immigrant to learn French in six months after arriving (under pain of being kicked out??).

Their founder Lord Conrad Black -the only columnist with an ounce of flamboyance - spent some time in an US jail before SCOTUS declared most of the accusations as unconstitutional. In jail he taught his fellow inmates to read and got them to get their GEDs.

Lord Black has been a tireless advocate of US prison reform, years before it became trendy.

Their religious columnist, a Catholic priest, is Goan and a staunch defender of Pope Francis (those who are Catholic will understand that).

Words that come to mind with NP are:

“mayonnaise”, “boring”, “establishment”, “Multiculturalism promoters”, “Pro-immigration”, “Post-religious Anglican”

That being said, they are critical of Trudeau - a man who wore blackface twice, brown-face (ie Indian) in his first term, fires women who criticize him publicly, etc.

The NP are the antipode of radical.

Public health officials should tread carefully otherwise they risk alienating large segments of the population. Which would inturn be bad for public health.

Already happened. The resistance to a lot of the public policies in NA (both US/Canada) during the pandemic is directly due to instances of overreach such as this.

That's a very very optimistic interpretation of North Americans' behavior.

I think it's too late.

In Australia the government has largely lost control of the population. They tried to lock down hard and faced resistance but every time they try to crack down harder or enforce the rules more, they get bigger protests.

Now they have just given up entirely and even the most minor restrictions and requests are largely ignored.

Do you live in the same Australia that I'm living in? Because that's not what I've observed at all, at least in Victoria.

For better or worse, the vase majority of Australians have complied with whatever restrictions and mandates that governments have put in place. VIC and NSW, which have borne the brunt of cases and broadly mandated vaccination, have ~95% of people aged 16+ vaccinated. People have generally complied with lockdown restrictions and requirements to wear masks.

Despite the media attention they garner, the protests involve a small minority of people. Victoria didn't see any significant opposition to lockdowns until the later half of this year. Most people seem happy enough getting paid $700 a week to sit at home and play Xbox.

That said, I have noticed that increasingly people are not bothering with the more tedious requirements such as wearing masks and checking in. I wouldn't say anywhere close to "largely ignored" though. I get the impression (from people I know) that it's mostly due to fatigue and risk habituation, rather than alienation.

Australia _has_ had pretty good compliance but I don't think they have control anymore. I don't think any state has the power to pull another lockdown, it just wouldn't go down with the public. When I was in Melbourne last week, mask rules were frequently ignored, QR codes entirely ignored and the majority of non essential businesses did not check my vaccine proof. I also had business owners tell me how they hate the government forcing them to check the vaccine proofs.

Vic tried to pull tighter restrictions which resulted in mass protests and the PM saying something along the lines of "The people have had enough of restrictions", after that restrictions have been going away.

I almost always land on the "more is better by definition' side of the privacy fence. For example I'm staunchly against Apple's CSAM scanning on-device, but in their cloud they can scan whatever they want.

So in this case, if it's anonymized and aggregated, how is it different from monitoring wastewater?

It's a flow of public info about something very private, but which is anonymized and aggregated such that what's personal/private is never revealed.

I will fight for my privacy rights every which way. But this particular one doesn't concern me because:

1. That data was already available and being sold (i.e. this isn't a new door opening)

2. It's not tied to me individually

I expect future generations will wonder why we'd ever push back against such a basic and necessary public health tool in a government's tool kit. To me it feels like pushing back against wastewater testing.

It is generally foolish to trust claims of data anonymization from a megacorp. So with the government, your ability to believe them will be based on your existing faith in your government's intent and technical prowess. I think Canadians are generally split on the former and quite pessimistic about the latter.

If they didn't anonymize the data, or tried but failed to, then we can hold them to account for that.

But the government didn't create this door or open this door. Whether or not they access this data, it's there to be accessed. Might as well use it for public good, and create a framework for using it safely.

No doubt after the first credit cards were issued, the banks starting selling purchase and merchant lists data to 'associates'. For our convenience of course.

>>The Agency is planning to track population movement for roughly the next five years, including to address other public health issues, such as “other infectious diseases, chronic disease prevention and mental health,” the spokesperson added.<<

A rebuke to anyone who downplays the slippery-slope warning. When the state assumes power, they seldom give it back. At least, not very easily.

I think the mobile phone tracking data is visualized in places like https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/ontario-dashboard/#mobilityl...

COVID has become an absolute wet dream for the surveillance state. It's amazing to me to see so many of my anti-establishment peers throw their convictions out the window because of tribal issues around the vaccine.

The government so easily divided us, and now as we bicker and complain about each other on social media they turn the screws on our freedom.

> It's amazing to me to see so many of my anti-establishment peers throw their convictions out the window because of tribal issues around the vaccine

Or they consider that a public health emergency such as a pandemic can only be dealt efficiently from a higher level authority making difficult decisions that have to be followed in order to work? Masks, social distancing, vaccines aren't really effective if they're not deployed on at least country level scale.

The surveillance and mandates are the direct result of the failure of government officials to prepare for any kind of pandemic, even a relatively mild one such as this. They should have been using the past 22 months to improve services and improve general health (obesity? mental health?) instead of dividing the public and destroying small businesses.

Suicide and fentanyl overdoses far exceeded covid deaths in those under 45 this year[1].

1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fentanyl-overdose-death/

This pandemic is mild only in lethality for <50 year olds. The spread is anything but mild. Preparation varied greatly among countries, some were more prepared than others (mostly in East Asia), but even they were heavily impacted. Many countries have drastically improved since the start of the pandemic, and after all, we now have vaccines to help.

If the public is getting divided over a subject like if wearing masks to limit the spread of an airborne virus, it's the public that's wrong and that's not the fault of a public health authority.

> They should have been using the past 22 months to improve services and improve general health (obesity? mental health?) instead of dividing the public and destroying small businesses

Some did. France did, and also did everything possible to limit the impact on children (schools stayed open) and businesses ( free loans, grants, covering of expenses like salaries and rent etc.). And the society isn't divided on masks and vaccines, the ones opposing the latter are a small minority.

> Suicide and fentanyl overdoses far exceeded covid deaths in those under 45 this year

Don't people over 45 matter too? I agree that for 80 year olds with a limited time span remaining it's not that tragic, but 50-60 year olds still have decades of life remaining in normal circumstances. Not to mention a non-zero number of <50 year olds have also died from Covid.

As other people have said: when you let the government expand its power in emergencies then you’ll never run out of emergencies.

Heavily disagree. A pandemic is a legitimate emergency, and I don't live in absolute fear that "the government" ( as if it's some monolithic entity) is composed of power hungry people whose only goal is more power, because, it isn't ( speaking for where i live, maybe you live in a place so terrible).

So they tracked 33 million devices in a country with a population of 38 million people. Did they basically track everyone? Or what led to some devices not being tracked?

According to Statistics Canada, 88.1% of Canadians had a smartphone in 2021. 33/38 is about 86%, so in the same ballpark. Maybe a few more percentage points have non-smart cellphones (though many flip phones these days run Android so they probably get counted as smart), but I think there are more cellphoneless people than many folks in the tech industry might assume.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=221001...

Seems like a reasonable avenue.. but it must be skewed by multiple devices (work+personal phone, phone+tablet+laptop each with a SIM - them being the same account isn't particularly relevant), and presumably it was `anonymize(SELECT * FROM active_sims)`.. including visitors and anyone else on the networks, which would also include children.

Just wonder when not having a phone and wearing sunglasses will be a crime.

This is weird but I’m ok with this myself

Since we're all under permanent unoverseen surveillance anyway, why not use it for something actually good?

I am a Canadian citizen.

I am so concerned about privacy that I don't have any account in any Facebook related company and switched of all gathering of personal information on Google.

But I approve this because it is anonymized and aggregated and complies with all the privacy regulations we already have.

This title is just libertarian fear-mongering, like almost everything the National Post publishes.

As someone else said, there is no way to anonymize movement data. If I spend from 8pm to 8am at some place 7 days a week, you can figure out which house that is and who I am.

Anonymized movement data is a fiction.

This pisses me off as a Canadian. As a health care worker I literally work going to upwards of 10 peoples homes per day. Because of this was I put under more scrutiny then others? Shame on public health who I essentially work for, shame on Telus.

They rather explicitly weren't using this to put individuals under scrutiny, given that it was anonymized, and aggregated...

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