Public health agency tracked Canadians' movements via phone data during pandemic | Hacker News Reader

Public health agency tracked Canadians' movements via phone data during pandemic

cp24.com

81 pointspigtailgirl28 comments

> Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, said the company's role is to produce “infectious disease insights,” not to collect location data directly from mobile devices.

> The company procured anonymous and aggregated data from third-party vendors so there was no information about the specific device the data came from.

So as with the CDC story a few days ago, this was done with location data made available by data brokers. The root cause here is that these companies are allowed to collect and store user location data at all. Until that's banned, anyone with enough money can do the same thing the CDC or the Canadian government did.

This is not government overreach, it's surveillance capitalism.

Edit: I also hate how this story buries the lede:

> Canadians' movements, including trips to the liquor store and pharmacy, were closely tracked via their mobile phones without their knowledge during the COVID-19 pandemic, a report sent to a parliamentary committee shows.

Yes, and in fact they were being closely tracked by the same private companies before the pandemic started and will continue to be closely tracked after the pandemic is over.

> Yes, and in fact they were being closely tracked by the same private companies before the pandemic started and will continue to be closely tracked after the pandemic is over.

And their personal data has been, is being, and will be used for far less agreeable purposes than epidemiological research.

I don't understand the hysteria around 'Big Tech' when there are a million shady-as-fuck companies out there (SafeGraph et al., cell carriers selling location history, etc.) doing things that are so much worse wrt. personal data. I have to assume that the politicians making noise about 'Big Tech' are on the payroll, because otherwise---if they actually cared about their constituents' right to privacy---'Big Tech' would hardly be a blip on the radar.

I think one of the reasons is politicians get much more out of yelling at Zuckerberg or Tim Cook than those other companies. I don't know if they are all on the payroll but overall they just seem ineffectual and focused on divisive issues.

For me the privacy things would go a lot farther if maybe the politicians started to get tracked publically or it was framed as companies selling your kids location and data. Think of the children and all. :)

I really wish the reporters had done some digging on who the "third party vendors" are in this case and how this data was collected.

I’m unfamiliar with Canadian law, but if there exist laws that protect people’s privacy from their government, then it would also be government overreach, right?

i'm not familiar with any law that forbids the government from using information that has been legally gathered just because they're the government. it may be illegal for the government to track or collect data on you while you use certain government-provided services, but that's not what's happening here.

if it's illegal to collect the information, then it's definitely illegal for the government to use it. but this information appears to be collected in a legal manner.

whether it should be legal is another matter entirely, but wishing doesn't make it so.

I believe that these rights extend from the charter protections against unreasonable search, similar to the US where they extend from due process requirements in the constitution.

It doesn’t matter though: in Canada, all charter freedoms are subject to “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”. During the pandemic, many charter freedoms have been suspended and no judge seems willing to say that they are unreasonable, always siding with the government (despite a lack of evidence to support the justification). This is just another example.

Only if this violates those laws.

this is a new version of spying on the number of cars parked in some parking lot each day. "Retail location insights" and other vague, broad euphemisms are used to describe round-trip recordings of massive numbers of "consumers." factual corrections welcome

I see no problem at all with counting the number of cars parked in some parking lot each day, assuming it’s a public parking lot. What would the concern be there?

I see a lot of problems with tracking the movement of individuals (or close proxies thereof, like their cell phone or car).

This is one of those weird stories that shows the randomness of what stories "catch on," as it were. It's been in the news for two years, now, but now treated as new? Is it just surprise that a public health agency would also be interested in the dataset? But... duh?

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/01/849161820/mobile-phone-data-s... - May 2020

"The data, provided to NPR by a mobile phone location data company called SafeGraph, is based on the locations of about 18 million mobile phones across the country."

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-03-16/pandemic... - March 2021

"The findings come from a Google compilation of vast troves of cellphone location tracking data, part of an ongoing effort the tech giant says it initiated to help leaders around the globe gauge the impact of coronavirus-related closures and travel restrictions."

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-12-09/the-pa... - Dec 2021

"The trade-offs of this emerging world were foreshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, when cities and countries decided on how far to infringe on personal freedoms to protect public health. Some of the nations that pried most deeply into private lives to track infections managed to keep deaths low, curb rampant spread and prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed."

And those are both VERY mainstream sources, so it's not even like it was being buried!

You cannot possibly believe that this story not catching on during the height of the pandemic is a product of "randomness".

This is one of the most wholesome uses of location data I’ve heard about. There was a NYT article a few years ago about the data brokers who sell this info, and how easy it was to deanonymize if you know where a specific person is at certain times. The journalist did this using Trump as an example, matching the location data in reports to where he had been seen on live tv.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/locat...

I am really curious who else buys this kind of data and what it’s used for. I’ve heard commercial real estate owners have also used it to track how many people are returning to offices so they can predict what their tenants will do when it comes time to renew the leases.

The article is in full damage control about how the data was anonymized. But they seem to be pretty squirrely about whether or not an "anonymous" device id showed specific locations and routes. Even if an anonymized report for a device excludes demographic information, it's relatively trivial to cross-reference common travel patterns to a person's home and workplace, and de-anonymize them.

Yeah, the only way you can anonymize this data is if you decouple all the data points from any way of re-associating them, and then take care of the timestamps too so you can't just find sequences that way.

If someone's really clever they might even have good ways to get past that, but I have enough second-hand familiarity with some of the players in this space to know they're aware of at least those methods. Whether or not they DO it consistently... well, I'm not holding my breath.

This is what I said. Also we already know where there is surveillance there is abuse [1], thank you Snowden. I don’t know how the information was accessed but if you wanted to spy on a loved one you would simply track movements to and from home and work to de anonymize then see if she/he travels anywhere else. I don’t support this tracking and do believe they should at the very least have an opt out option but better would be opt in. [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2485190/nsa-admits-emp...

Old news: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadas-public-health-a...

Which really only comes from this page: https://buyandsell.gc.ca/procurement-data/tender-notice/PW-2...

What's important to note here. This is december 2021, this is many months after Texas and Florida dropped all covid mandates. The science around the world had been clear that covid was no longer pandemic and had gone to endemic stage. This procurement wasn't done for covid at all. This was done to legitimately track Canadians ongoing from now on.

We often left phones at home during lockdowns. Or put in airplane mode. Just in case. Messing up statistic based on illegal acts from our gonverments feels good.

Here's part of the headline sent to me today (in Canada) on Apple News:

> How we got tracked via our phones during COVID

Uh, thanks Apple?

They did this in the UK and and from time to time mentioned doing so in official briefings.

Hence i turn off my phone at various points/ locations during the day. I still have google locations on, so its fun to see the gaps. Pretty sure i can be phone-tracked otherwise though.

Yes, every day at some points they presented a graph of mobility data that was explicitly attributed to mobile phone data.

I wonder if the US government secretly did this, too. We may never know.

We 100% know they regularly buy this kind of data from cell phone companies. There was even a story a few days ago about how the CDC bought similar data.

Buying tracking data from private sources has even been tested in court if my memory is correct. As the government is buying a publicly available asset they do not need a court order to do so.

It's bullshit, but legal with almost no call to change the law.

Yes, they did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31248556

Also Australia...

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/mobile-phone-location-data...

The Melbourne CBD pedestrian counters are open data... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-11-08/victoria-melbourne-co...

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