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The Conversation
The Conversation
Geoffrey M Rockwell, Professor of Philosophy and Digital Humanities, University of Alberta

Ottawa's use of our location data raises big surveillance and privacy concerns

Cellular phones track and reveal owners' movements, generating useful data for pandemic tracking. (Shutterstock)

News recently broke that the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) had been procuring location data from millions of mobile devices to study how COVID-19 lockdowns were working.

Appalled opposition MPs called for an emergency meeting of the ethics committee of the House of Commons, fearing that the pandemic was being used as an excuse to scale up surveillance.

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