Industry committee  Perhaps I can respond very quickly. With workplaces, I think we're going to have to be looking at PIPEDA, and we're going to be looking at provincial laws to the extent that they're applicable in Alberta, B.C. or Quebec. That's where we're going to have to look for solutions, and I don't think there are particularly good ones right now.

Industry committee  Effectiveness really depends on what the goals are. If the goals are to replace human contact tracing, I don't think it will be effective. If the goals are to support or supplement it, depending on the design, possibly there will be some usefulness there. If the goals are to actually collect, indirectly, data that can be used in analytics for disease modelling, then maybe there will be some useful data collected, but that's a different message that needs to be sent to Canadians.

Industry committee  The question of ownership of data, the language of ownership, can be a bit problematic or misleading in this context. In the Canadian approach, we've always talked about interests in data. We recognize that there can be multiple interests in data. A private sector company that collects data has an interest in the data they collect.

Industry committee  Yes, I do. These are laws that were drafted at a time when we collected far less data and did far fewer things with data. They were written for a very different type of environment. We are in a data-driven society. We need laws that are adapted to it.

Industry committee  One thing that has been raised by so many critics of PIPEDA is enforcement: that there simply aren't enough teeth in PIPEDA, that there is inadequate enforcement of privacy rights. Therefore, that is one very important area that would have to be looked at.

Industry committee  COVID-19 is a wake-up call in many respects. Essentially, it has caught us with our privacy pants down. We need to have the digital legal infrastructure in place so that we can respond to situations as they come up. We find ourselves in this situation with outdated privacy laws for the public and private sectors, and this is a disadvantage.

Industry committee  That's an interesting question, because no two contact-tracing apps are created equal. There are contact-tracing apps that focus on collecting only data about proximity of devices. There are contact-tracing apps that also collect GPS data, which could be useful to public health authorities in determining where there are outbreaks.

Industry committee  There are two things. One is, for a general national contact-tracing app, we've already heard about the challenges with making that mandatory. There are serious civil liberty issues with forcing people to carry their cellphones everywhere and have them running these apps in the background.

Industry committee  Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members, for the opportunity to address this committee on privacy in Canada's COVID-19 response. We're currently in a situation in which Canadians are very vulnerable economically, socially and in terms of their physical and mental health. Canadians know that sacrifices are necessary to address this crisis and have already made sacrifices of different magnitudes.