How long do they get this information, and who has access to it? The privacy culture in Canada is different from that of the US or Germany, with some major pri

How long do they get this information, and who has access to it? The privacy culture in Canada is different from that of the US or Germany, with some major privacy players today having close law enforcement and intelligence community backgrounds. For example, the executive director of the Canadian Centre for Civil Liberties in the article also happens to be a former provincial attorney general responsible for some pretty hysterical anti-civil liberties regulations in regard to law enforcement discretion (automatic roadside vehicle seizure for speeding, "pit bull" ban), in addition to his ideological anti-firearms advocacy in a country with some of the strictest and most byzantine gun laws on the planet. The federal privacy commissioner is a former federal assistant deputy attorney general which arguably makes him a member of the intelligence community. Regardless of your political leanings, it's hard to make the case that former prosecutors and intelligence community members make credible privacy advocates. In Canada, there is a popular contempt for the notion of "freedom," in the American sense, as the concept implies there may be limits to bureaucratic remit and to the total sovereign power of the crown. Such freedom is a myth only the young or uneducated believe in. There are a few rights carved out of the total dominion of the crown, but those are exceptions. It's a very different culture here. In terms of using cell tracking data to manage the pandemic, the case for what difference the data would makes needs to be clearer. Leveraging the crisis to get the data ("squeezing the toothpaste out of the tube") is standard bureaucracy playbook here, and everyone should be skeptical of it. "Because crisis!" is not a reason or justification people should accept for anything, and we should push back on anyone who seems to be leveraging hysteria and who won't provide a sound and transparent rationale with clear limits.