A group of human rights organizations are raising concerns over Guelph police’s use of a COVID-19 database, which they say was accessed 4,057 times by the service.
Between April and July, police services had access to the names, birth dates and addresses of people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus under the province’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.
The Ontario government has ended police access to the database after a legal challenge was filed by the Aboriginal Legal Services, the Black Legal Action Centre, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario.
The group has since ended their legal challenge, but say they are concerned about the storage and use of this information by police services.
The groups are now calling them to destroy the personal health information that has already been accessed and conduct audits to ensure the data accessed complies with policy and legal requirements.
But they are also raising concerns specifically with Guelph police and have written a letter to the chair of the police services board, Robert Carter, because of the number of times it accessed the database.
Guelph police had the sixth-highest searches of the databases out of all the other Ontario police services and fourth-highest per capita.
“The abnormally high number of times the data was accessed raises concerns about whether the database was being used appropriately and whether this large amount of personal information is still being used locally,” the letter states.
The number of searches raises concerns given Guelph’s population of just over 130,000 and its low number of coronavirus cases at only 251 to date.
A Guelph police spokesperson said the service had no comment on Wednesday afternoon.
“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,” the groups stated in their later.
The group is also asking Guelph police and other services about where the data is currently being stored, who has access to it and for what purpose.
Given the high number of searches, the group wants an audit by the Guelph police services board to look at who made the requests for information from the database and were the requests made by authorized users for authorized purposes.
The Guelph police services board is expected to meet for its monthly meeting on Sept. 17.
Comments