covid alert

To kick off a new monthly bonus series on tech in Canada, Paris Marx is joined by Bianca Wylie to discuss Canada’s COVID Alert app, the problems with the digital contract-tracing experiment, and why we need a public post-mortem so lessons are learned for next time.

Bianca Wylie is a partner at Digital Public, a co-founder of Tech Reset Canada, and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Follow Bianca on Twitter at @biancawylie.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• This series on Canadian tech is made in partnership with Passage, a left-wing publication in Canada. Passage published an edited transcript of the conversation.
• On June 17, 2022, Health Canada decommissioned the COVID Alert app.
• In April, Bianca wrote that the government needed to shut down the COVID Alert app because it wasn’t working (if it ever had). She also began writing a series on the app on her Medium blog that month.
• In July 2020, Bianca and her colleague Sean Mcdonald were already asking questions about the app and the planning around it.
• Other digital contact-tracing apps were launched in many other countries, including Australia, France, and Iceland, with poor results.

"We fight for that" - is the new podcast from the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC) focussing on consumer protection in Canada.  This first episode includes an introduction to PIAC, asking and answering why you, as a Canadian consumer, keep asking "Am I Going Crazy?" when you have a problem with your purchases and subscriptions; and a detailed explanation of PIAC's COVID Alert app CRTC Application, that seeks to limit government access to any personal information from contact-tracing in Canada.  Our last segment, which we hope will be fun, is "I told you so!" - where we call out government, regulators, the industry or even ourselves, when someone should have known better (and we already told them so).  This week: the freight-train wreck that is the CRTC and wireless companies' efforts to stamp out "SIM-swap fraud" in cellphone number porting.  Why not just hold a public hearing where real consumers could help make sure the process of changing from one cellphone to another is easy and quick, but also that fraudsters cannot pretend to be you, take over your phone account, and steal your money? Why take the very people - consumers - out of the debate over the security of their most important device, their cellphone? C'mon CRTC - hold a public hearing - it's not just PIAC but also a Parliamentary Committee that wants one.