Information & Ethics committee  No, I think that's right. It would be removing a tool that's useful in the context of us, as a public health community, not having many tools. Beyond that, I'm not sure. I think Dr. Khan gave a comprehensive answer.

Information & Ethics committee  If it's helpful to clarify, in public health, surveillance is used as a catch-all term for infectious disease case data or other disease case data. I'm not certain which document he's referring to, but that is a general term well understood within public health collection of data about individual cases in the context of an issue of public health importance.

Information & Ethics committee  I would agree with the general statement. There are widely accepted additional requirements when data could be associated with an individual in any conceivable way, and certainly in medicine and epidemiology, when private health information is included, there are additional levels of scrutiny and security.

Information & Ethics committee  We would have to check the geographic locations of the physical servers that our cloud providers use in our case. It would be Canada or the U.S., and we'd confer with our head of technology to be sure. I'd be happy to report back with a definitive answer.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, we've spoken to our general cybersecurity and data security practices. As the honourable member will be aware, innovative Canadian start-ups need to be quite conscious of data privacy, as our innovations are globally sought after for a number of reasons. It's top of mind.

Information & Ethics committee  I

Information & Ethics committee  I'm happy to speak to this. In this context, because the data are only de-identified location information, there's no degree of consent for additional information. We never receive anything beyond the de-identified location or aggregated summary metrics related to movement. For this purpose, there's no notion of degree of consent or additional information that we could obtain per device or in aggregate.

Information & Ethics committee  To be clear, that RFP was exclusively about cell tower data, which we don't possess, so we're not eligible for that RFP.

Information & Ethics committee  I see. Mr. Chair, I do think that it's probably true in the general sense that opt-in policies usually result in fewer people opting in than opt-out policies do. I think that is true as a general statement.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I'm happy to speak to that one. Our general practice is to aggregate either by time or by a geographic boundary defined by population for all analyses we supply to the agency. In the case of a rural setting, the smallest geographic boundary would be defined by the underlying population as calculated by Statistics Canada.

Information & Ethics committee  No. It would not, in any way whatsoever.

Information & Ethics committee  GPS data is not located at a precise point in space. It's—

Information & Ethics committee  It's an excellent question. That's a good example. The specific analysis of “home” is not a reference to a home in the sense of a person's home. It's the primary location of the device, defined as a zone of about 600 square metres. The purpose of that analysis is to distinguish devices that are staying close to their primary location, versus those that are moving about, as a proxy for contact rates in the population.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, I can respond. To clarify, Telus is not a data supplier for us. We have no relationship with Telus.

Information & Ethics committee  Certainly. I was an epidemiologist, data scientist and manager of data engineering teams at the agency for years. In the context of the pandemic, I worked in the emergency operations centre, building and refining data systems used for more traditional public health data. I was aware of BlueDot and had worked with BlueDot's software in a previous role, but at that time had no interaction or involvement with BlueDot's work.