I'm David Lyon, professor emeritus at Queen's University and former director of the Surveillance Studies Centre. I had a new book published recently, Pandemic Surveillance. That book acknowledges the importance and the risk of public health surveillance.
I am a historian and a sociologist, not a legal or technical expert. My interest in this case has primarily to do with surveillance using location data, which is the perceived issue in the arrangement for Telus to grant access to location data to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
A Globe and Mail article dismissed this as “a tizzy about 'surveillance'”, but whatever actually happened between Telus and the Public Health Agency, I want to say that surveillance is involved. Let me explain.
The concept of surveillance is being used in different ways. The alleged “tizzy” only occurred if what is happening is not really surveillance. The assumption here is that surveillance is defined in a way that highlights, say, police keeping a suspect under observation or intelligence agencies keeping watch on those suspected of terrorism. This would mean that specific people could be identified.
The committee was reassured by Dr. Theresa Tam that the location data was de-indentified, and by Minister Duclos that there was no surveillance here and thus no risk to Canadians.
I just want to make a point about the question of the definition of de-indentification. I'm not an expert on de-indentified data, but high-level studies from various places, one from Imperial College London and the university in Leuven, show that 99.8% of Americans could be reidentified in a dataset that used 15 demographic attributes. There is potential for reidentification, and therefore reassurances are required that the data are really secure and are used only for appropriate purposes.
Let me get back to the question of how we define this word “surveillance”. The Public Health Agency of Canada engages in surveillance. For the World Health Organization, surveillance is “the ongoing, systematic collection, analysis, and interpretation of health-related data essential to planning, implementation, and evaluation of public health practice.” The World Health Organization also notes the social and other dimensions of surveillance, warning that surveillance tools are not neutral and may be used in ways that challenge other priorities such as human rights and civil liberties.
This committee was informed by Dr. Tam that the location data was used for at least two purposes: to discover whether lockdown measures were really being observed and to discern the geographical spread of the virus. We must note that the meaning of “surveillance” has expanded considerably over the past few decades. The police or security definition often includes monitoring, tracking or profiling a suspect. This may mean trawling through datasets containing identifiable data. In North America, such surveillance is often qualified by the word “electronic”; in the European Union, however, the simple word “surveillance” is routinely used to cover many kinds of data collected [Technical difficulty—Editor] use, both in the public sphere and in the private, such as targeted advertising.
I would say that surveillance is really the focused, routine and systematic attention to personal details for specific purposes, such as management, protection or influence. It includes individual scrutiny such as monitoring of suspects, but also an interest in population groups. Surveillance is whatever makes people visible. Whether it is done with individualized, identifiable means or whether it has to do with population groups, either is risky, as the WHO points out. People are being treated differently, either as individuals or as groups.
Today, in a situation where we have almost ubiquitous use of smart phones generating huge quantities of data, including location data, their use depends on the analytic power of large organizations, public and private. Many prize that data. It was misused in China and Korea, for example—