Canada's privacy commissioner believes that the federal government must obtain "meaningful consent" from citizens should it want to use smartphone apps to trace coronavirus cases.
Daniel Therrien, in an interview, said he agrees with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's statement that any system designed for contact tracing purposes should be voluntary to earn the support of the public. However, he insists that the app's design must meet a series of guidelines to balance privacy issues with public health needs.
Commissioner Therrien laid out some of the most important privacy guidelines he believes contact tracing apps should have before its mass introduction. The most critical, he said, is that the app should only collect health data and location for public health purposes and not for "state surveillance" or commercial purposes. He added that data should stay on the user's phone as de-identified and "aggregate" information.
The government must also disclose how a user's data will be used in order to achieve "meaningful consent," meaning the public must know what they're signing up for. The commissioner also pointed out that the data accumulated by contact tracing apps should only be kept for the duration of the pandemic, and by the time the crisis is over, all gathered data must be destroyed.
Trudeau and deputy chief public health officer Howard Njoo on Wednesday said that Ottawa is looking into the potential of using smartphone apps to track COVID-19 positive individuals. The prime minister already announced that a few companies are already working on several systems that the country may use with privacy in consideration. "As we move forward on taking decisions, we're going to keep in mind that Canadians put a very high value on their privacy, on their data security," the Canadian prime minister said. "We need to make sure we respect that even in a time of emergency measures and significant difficulty."
Meanwhile, chief public health officer Dr. Theresa Tam believes that digital contact tracing must be implemented at all costs and should be prioritized before the economy, which has been in turmoil since lockdown measures have been implemented to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
Alberta became the first jurisdiction in Canada to introduce a contact tracing app called ABTraceTogether on Friday. The province is already taking steps to reopen facilities and businesses.
The ABTraceTogether contact tracing app was developed in close contact with Therrien's office and appears to follow the commissioner's important privacy guidelines.
