Canadian government secretly used mobile data to track residents during lockdown

THE CANADIAN government used the data of mobile devices to monitor the movements of residents during lockdown, it has admitted.

It also said it was planning on tracking the population’s movements for roughly the next five years. The admission raises worries of governments using the emergency situation coronavirus created to instigate mass spying.

Last week, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) revealed that it had accessed the location data.

Canada's The National newspaper claims data of 33 million mobile devices was monitored.

There are 38 million people living in Canada – which would mean nearly 87 percent of the population was tracked, assuming each device tracked corresponds to one individual.

A spokesperson for the agency told Canadian newspaper The National: “Due to the urgency of the pandemic, [PHAC] collected and used mobility data, such as cell-tower location data, throughout the COVID-19 response.”

They added that the agency used the data to evaluate the effectiveness of public lockdown measures against actual behavioural trends.

The spokesperson said that the data had allowed PHAC to “understand possible links between movement of populations within Canada and spread of COVID-19.”

They noted that the contract awarded for the “de-identified and aggregated data” expired in October. As such, PHAC no longer has access to the data.

However, the agency is planning on tracking population movement for approximately the next five years, it said, to address other public health issues.

These include “other infectious diseases, chronic disease prevention and mental health”, the spokesperson said.

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