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> 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 mobil
by AlexandrB 5y ago
> 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.
- junofan 5y agoI’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?
- vkou 5y agoOnly if this violates those laws.
- notatoad 5y agoi'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.
- amscanne 5y agoI 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.
- mistrial9 5y agothis 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
- sokoloff 5y agoI 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).
- caconym_ 5y ago> 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.
- lancesells 5y agoI 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. :)
- AlexandrB 5y agoI really wish the reporters had done some digging on who the "third party vendors" are in this case and how this data was collected.