Limit use of contact tracing app

In the ongoing fight against COVID-19, most provinces are considering a new weapon.

Using a cellphone app that gathers data on your movements can make what public health officials call contact tracing much easier.

If you’ve tested positive for the virus, officials need this information so they can trace your contacts and figure out where you might have contracted it and who might be at risk since then. Without it, they have to depend on interviews and detective work, which takes more time and depends on often-poor memories.

Nova Scotia hasn’t said anything about this practice yet, but Alberta is already using one, while Newfoundland and Labrador and New Brunswick are among those considering it.

So far, so good. Most reasonable people don’t object to what amounts to an invasion of privacy by the government in the service of a greater good, namely, the battle against a pernicious, deadly virus.

But there’s a debate afoot about what comes next. What becomes of the data after the contact tracing is done? Does it remain in a government or corporate database? How do we safeguard against that data being misused?

Newfoundland and Labrador privacy commissioner Michael Harvey summed the concern up nicely.

"My concern about an app like this would be if the foot was put in the door for even greater surveillance, to use the pandemic as an excuse to surveil us even more," Harvey told the CBC.

That extra surveillance could include law enforcement. In Nova Scotia, we’ve seen cases of civil servants accessing health records improperly. And there’s the simple right to privacy. No one wants a record of their movements sitting in a database for some purpose other than fighting the coronavirus.

Now, let’s face it. Your electronic footprints are already everywhere, clearly visible to web-based corporate giants like Facebook and Google. These companies use this data to place ads in your social media feeds and for other obscure purposes they decline to disclose.

But there’s implied consent for much of that when you sign up for those services. If you don’t like the idea of Facebook knowing what you do online, you don’t have to use it.

A survey from Abacus Data released last week made it clear that most Canadians would consent to a health authority’s use of this data to fight the virus.

However, the country’s privacy commissioners issued some sensible advice in a letter to governments. They say the app should be voluntary, should be time-limited and should record only location data.

They also said personal data collected to fight COVID-19 should be used for no other purpose. They’re right.