Canada’s federal government admitted to secretly surveilling its population’s movements during the COVID-19 lockdown by tracking 33 million phones according to the New York Post.
The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) clandestinely tracked the devices to assess “the public’s responsiveness during lockdown measures,” the agency acknowledged last week, according to Blacklock’s Reporter, which first reported the disclosure. Canada’s entire population totals 38 million, according to Statistics Canada.
“Evidence is coming in from many sources, from countries around the world, that what was seen as a huge surveillance surge — post 9/11 — is now completely upstaged by pandemic surveillance,” David Lyon, author of “Pandemic Surveillance” and the former director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Ontario, told the National Post.
“Due to the urgency of the pandemic, (PHAC) collected and used mobility data, such as cell-tower location data, throughout the COVID-19 response,” a spokesperson told National Post. The program’s existence was first brought to wider attention by Blacklock’s Reporter.
PHAC used the location data to evaluate the effectiveness of public lockdown measures and allow the Agency to “understand possible links between the movement of populations within Canada and spread of COVID-19,” the spokesperson said.
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.
