Thank you.
Mr. Chair, I was just going to mention very quickly that the actual reason we collected this data is that reliable, timely and relevant health and public health data comes out of this for other policy- and decision-making. This is population-level mobility data analysis. This is what we have collected. No personal information was asked for or was received, and no individual's identifiable data is contained in any part of the work.
The mobility data, which were offered through the service provider, was actually analyzed by the communications research centre here at Innovation, Science and Economic Development. That would help us to understand the possible link between the movement of populations within Canada and the impact of that on COVID-19. We did that in a very clear way, keeping the means of collection open and transparent. When we use that information, it is never individually identifiable. Again, it is aggregated data.
Throughout this process, Mr. Chair, the Public Health Agency of Canada engaged with privacy as well as ethics experts to ensure that the government was following best practices. We engaged our Privacy Commissioner on this initiative as early on as April 2020, and technical briefings have continued. To mitigate any privacy risks we may have, we actually require that mobility data vendors apply very robust data anonymization and aggregation controls even prior to data extraction and access.
That is what I would offer, Mr. Chair, at this point.