Finally, we note for the Commission that we have communicated this Application to the federal Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, and to the privacy commissioners of Ontario and Alberta, respectively, as the Application may assist these offices in their interactions with the public or with the various governments and app developers, as the case may be. [...] We argue not, for the simple reason that the reasonable contemplation of uploading a positive diagnosis key would be for the purpose of protecting public health, and it would not be in the reasonable contemplation of users of the app to think that this socially-conscious step would also amount to permission to the government to discover and possibly use and disclosure the individual user’s persona. [...] During the sign-up process, none of the main, mandatory screens detailing the general descriptions of the app’s functioning, the positive diagnosis key uploads, or positive key downloads, or of use of the Internet, suggest any risk whatever of the possible identification of the user, but rather appear to reassure the user at several stages that this either cannot, or will not, happen. [...] More importantly, PIAC submits that whatever the assertions made in these sign-up processes and whatever the conclusions of Health Canada’s privacy self-assessment and the review of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada based on general privacy statutes such as the Privacy Act and PIPEDA, that the Telecommunications Act imposes privacy requirements on the potential for revelation of sub. [...] This likely led the Alberta creators of the app and writers of the privacy policy to focus only on provincial privacy law, and not the requirements of federal law, in particular the telecommunications law decreed by the CRTC over the years in relation to privacy.
Authors
- Pages
- 232
- Published in
- Canada
