Privacy commissioner: Few realized the feds were tracking their pandemic movements

National Post: 'The government should have been more proactive in letting Canadians know it was acquiring anonymized cellphone location data from third-parties to track movement patterns during the pandemic, federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien said.

'“I highly, highly doubt that the majority of users of mobility services knew that their data was collected,” Therrien told a parliamentary committee Monday. That’s despite the fact the federal government outlined that information online on its COVIDTrends website.

'“In order to get to that page, you need to know that the program exists and there is something called COVIDTrends,” he noted. Therrien told MPs the government should have been more proactive in its communication strategy, such as outlining that information in press conferences.'