Not really a catchy title, is it? Still, I think it’s worth highlighting the federal Privacy Commissioner’s report, published on May 30, that found that, “with some exceptions, that the measures implemented by the government during the pandemic complied with relevant privacy laws and were necessary and proportional in response to the unprecedented public health crisis.” After all, it’s not everyday that we hear that a government actually did a pretty good job in protecting citizens’ privacy.

That this is largely a good-news story may account for why it doesn’t seem to have been discussed widely beyond this National Post article: a bit of a disappointment, given the harsh criticisms the government endured at the time for tracking Canadians’ mobility through cell phone tower data as a pandemic-mitigation measure.

Anyways, the picture that emerges from the report is of a government that, on the policy side of things, operated with a relatively strong interest in protecting Canadians’ privacy, including such policies as the Covid Alert app and the program for using cell phone tower data, provided by Telus, to see if Canadians were following quarantine orders. Note that the Privacy Commissioner not only found the government to be in compliance with the Privacy Act (which pretty much every critic had granted), but that “the government’s response to the pandemic … was also necessary and proportional consider the unprecedented health crisis”: a higher standard, as the Privacy Commissioner also notes.

Instead, the government came in for the strongest criticism for its communication of its plans; i.e., that they didn’t adequately communicate to Canadians that they were doing a good job.

I don’t know about you, but as a Canadian, I’ll take the problem of “use your words better” over bad government policy every day of the week.

This report is, I think, important for two reasons. First, it further highlights just how delusional and paranoid the people behind the Ottawa Occupation (which was ramping up just as worries about cell phone tower surveillance for pandemic-mitigation reasons were coming to light) were. To the extent that such government actions provided the pretext for their unlawful occupation of Canada’s capital, they were flat-out wrong. That Pierre Poilievre owes his ascension to the head of the Conservative Party to the tumult of the Ottawa Occupation and its paranoid delusions should give us all pause.

Second, it highlights the need for a much more nuanced discussion of privacy and surveillance. In particular, I think we need to keep in mind that not all surveillance is created equally. As the Privacy Commissioner’s comments on necessity and proportionality during a pandemic highlights, surveillance conducted by health authorities during a pandemic for the purposes of stopping the pandemic is in no way equivalent to surveillance undertaken by police, or by security services for national security, or by surveillance-capitalist companies who want to commodify and sell your data.

All too often, these distinctions get muddled together when we focus on privacy as a single thing, rather than something that can be positive or negative depending on the context. One of the case studies in in my upcoming book (with Natasha Tusikov) is the failed Covid Alert app. One of the things that characterized its development was its focus on privacy above all else. It was designed to minimize data collection, a weird choice during a pandemic, when surveillance of disease transmission could save lives. This choice was made in large part because of dual non-health imperatives: because it was being run on infrastructure provided by surveillance capitalists, who have shown they cannot be trusted with our data, and undertaken against a general backdrop of suspicion of any government surveillance, with no distinction drawn between surveillance conducted by security services and health officials. There’s a lot to unpack there (download the open-access version when it’s released in July!). In any case, a failure to distinguish between good and bad surveillance, if you will, certainly didn’t help.

Keeping this basic point in mind — that the value of privacy is contextual — can help us think more clearly about the challenges posed by privacy and surveillance, and hopefully to jump at fewer shadows in the future.