The Guelph Police Service will not say why it made more than 4,000 inquiries into a provincial database of COVID-19 health data, while a civil liberties organization is asking all personal information that was collected be destroyed.
On Monday, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) sent a letter to the Guelph Police Services Board with questions regarding the 4,057 times a provincial database of private health information related to COVID-19 was accessed by the department.
CCLA alleges the actions by Guelph Police and other departments in Ontario breaches provincial health privacy protections and violates individuals’ constitutional rights to privacy and equality.
Reached by email on Wednesday morning, media relations officer Const. Brian Murphy said the department is not making any comment on this matter at this time.
Police were allowed by the province to obtain the names, addresses, and dates of birth of Ontarians who had tested positive for COVID-19 for more than three months since April.
Although more than 4,000 inquiries were made to the database by Guelph Police, there has been only 252 confirmed cases of COVID-19 to date in Guelph. CCLA said the number of inquiries made by the Guelph Police was ‘unusually high.’
In total, police services in Ontario conducted over 95,000 searches of the database while it was active. Guelph Police Service was among the top 5 in number of requests made to the database per capita.
The police departments in Ontario were able to access the information after the province made an emergency regulation authorizing the data-sharing. The provincial government revoked that regulation authorizing use of the database on July 22, 2020, after CCLA filed a judicial review of the procedure.
CCLA said it is deeply concerned about how that personal health information is being stored and used by police departments across the province, even after the province revoked access to it.
"We have written to police service boards and chiefs of police across Ontario to find out what happened to these Ontarians’ health information – who has access to it and where it is being stored,” said Abby Deshman, director of the Criminal Justice Program for CCLA. “We are calling on the police to destroy the personal health information they have collected to date.”
CCLA wants to know where the personal health information is being stored, who has access to that data and for what purposes, whether that data has been accessed since access to the database has been shut down, as well as by what process will the data be deleted.
The association is requesting the Guelph Police Services Board undertake an audit of the use of the database and to make those findings available to the public.
CCLA wants to know if the requests were made by authorized users, who were those authorized users, were the requests made for authorized purposes and what were those purposes, as well as what was the reason for such abnormally high access requests?
“Transparency and accountability require that the public be informed of the reasons for the Guelph Police Service’s unusually high number of searches against the database,” said CCLA in the letter to the board.
