Etches: no plans to track cellphones
Ottawa Public Health doesn’t have a plan to analyze location data from cellphones to see if people are congregating during this unprecedented time of physical distancing, the agency’s leader said Tuesday.
Vera Etches, the city’s medical officer of health, said that if the agency pursued that data-mining option, it would do it “in a way that’s open,” with an understanding how privacy is protected and if the information-gathering technique actually works.
“We haven’t seen that yet, that there’s something that make sense to go forward with, but we’ll continue to explore what those different sources are that could give us better information,” Etches said during her update on the novel coronavirus in Ottawa.
The health unit wants to better understand if people are heeding its advice to physically stay away from each other, and if they must be around others are making sure they’re at least two metres apart. The information would help officials model the spread of the coronavirus and understand people’s concerns.
On Monday, Etches brought up the potential of analyzing cellphone location data as an option to see if people are congregating. It came as leaders across all three levels of government ramped up their messaging about the importance of physical distancing, which is the term now preferred over social distancing.
A day later, Etches played down the potential for using cellphone data. The health unit still intends to poll people and review complaints in its effort to understand how serious people are taking its messages.
Etches said the health unit would talk with the province if it looked like there was an “appropriate way” to access cellphone information.
University of Ottawa Prof. Teresa Scassa, who holds the Canada Research Chair in information law and policy, suspects people would be agreeable to special monitoring programs, but it depends what the measures are.
There might be public tolerance for monitoring people congregating, especially since so many have given up their freedom in an effort to stop the spread of the virus,
Scassa said.
“There’s a sense of frustration when others are just ignoring that and possibly jeopardizing the sacrifices and efforts everybody else is making,” Scassa said in an interview Tuesday.
However, there would need to be protections to make sure any monitoring program doesn’t become the status quo and that any data collected is destroyed within a reasonable amount of time, Scassa added.
There are scenarios in which tracking people could be both helpful and tricky under privacy laws.
Local governments might be able to get aggregate data of where cellphone are located without personal information, Scassa said.
The next question is, what would feed the location data?
Scassa pointed out that data generated by cellphone applications that collect GPS co-ordinates would provide better information than data showing which cell towers are connecting to phones.
“For me the bottom line is that we already have privacy laws in place that put restriction on what the private sector can share and what governments can ask for and what governments can do with data, and those restrictions are there for good reason,” Scassa said.
“There’s scope to alter that in a time of crisis and there may be justification for doing that, but it’s important to remember that measures need to be proportional and limited to the crisis. There’s a lot we can do and we have to think carefully about how we’re going to do it.”