Thread by @Norlaine

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) purchased aggregated, de-identified data from Telus to figure out general trends in the travel of Canadians in light of COVID restrictions. Let's talk about this. 1/20 #cdnpoli
nationalpost.com/news/canada/ca…

First of all, if they bought it from Telus, we know Telus already was collecting the data. Why? Was it some reason as benign as trying to figure out if Canadians were obeying the public health measures and predict where new outbreaks might occur? 2/20

Or are they selling personally identified to marketers to better direct advertising? You know, how you go to a store and suddenly you're getting ads for whatever that store sells? Like that. Which is annoying, tbh. 3/20

"Aggregated" - data of multiple individuals combined to produce meta measures. Like average age of purchasers of a certain product. That's it. No names, postal codes, phone numbers, just average age. It is data that answers the question of "how many?", but not "who?" 4/20

"De-identified" - goes along with aggregated. No personally identifying information. Just numbers, percentages, etc. StatsCan de-identifies and aggregates data all the time. Average income, average age, % retired, etc. 5/20
remix.com/blog/aggregati…

This is being done all over the world as governments desperately try to find a way to protect their populations from becoming ill, possibly dying, of COVID. There are different ways they are tracking people, of course. 6/20
hrw.org/news/2020/05/1…

There are other, more costly and more intrusive, ways governments could check to make sure people are obeying public health rules. There could be CCTV surveillance, drone surveillance, tracking of ATM use, roadway checkpoints, monitoring of social media, etc. 7/20

But PHAC chose to use probably the least obtrusive method available to them. After all, you are already being tracked all the time, and it doesn't seem to alarm people. They purchased data which is already being collected, and sold to marketers, etc. 8/20

One cyber-security expert I know commented that this was a genius move to try to predict outbreaks and track the spread of contagion. This data purchased offered no way of tracking individuals in and of itself, just travel patterns of the population overall. 9/20

Enter Pierre Poilievre, a candidate for the leadership of the CPC. He wants you to be alarmed. He wants you to be paranoid about this. He wants you to be VERY AFRAID. 10/20

Poilievre is spinning here, skewing the truth, disinforming the public. This is not surveillance of YOU, as he says it is. This is monitoring of trends in different locations. You know those strips they sometimes put on roadways? There's usually 2 a few feet apart. 11/20

Those count how many vehicles use a particular section of road. They may also track the speed those vehicles are going. This informs the government responsible for the road about speed limit observance, and maybe tells if them the road is inadequate to the traffic load. 12/20

Do those strips on the road make you fear about your privacy? Every time you use your debit or credit card, data is captured. How much you spent, where you spent it, what you bought. Does using cards make you fear about your privacy? 13/20

Do you know how your GPS knows if there is a traffic jam up ahead on your route? It uses cell phone data from other drivers to show where there are a large number of vehicles together. Does using your GPS make you fear for your privacy? 14/20

The data used by PHAC was far less obtrusive than pretty well any other method they could have used. Poilievre knows this. He knows that everyone's data is being collected, every minute of every day, by someone. 15/20

And most data collectors are not as benign as the Public Health Agency of Canada. Poilievre knows that this is not the huge issue he wants to make it into. But he also believes his base is not very bright. He believes they will buy it, just like they buy his bitcoins. 16/20

This is not the first time Pierre Poilievre has tried to pull the wool over voters' eyes. For example, he attempted to churn up a scandal about renovations that had been planned for years by the NCC, suggesting Trudeau was building himself a palace with public money. 17/20

This renovation at Harrington Lake was approved when Harper was PM. Poilievre knows that. And yet, he did this: 18/20

That's actually a lie. And he told it, apparently confident that Canadians have no idea how anything works. He thinks we're stupid. He thinks we're dupes. So he makes up yarns worthy of the National Enquirer. Most of us realize one who lies so easily is not PM material. 19/20

It seems some Canadians are gullible enough to believe what Poilievre says. He has been getting good turnouts at his Trump Rallies. As P.T. Barnum said "There's a sucker born every minute." But most of us can see through his snake oil pitches, right? 20/20
#NeverVoteConservative