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“We have not been contacted by the City of Toronto,” said Richard Gilhooley, a Telus spokesperson.

On Tuesday morning, Rogers said it was not one of the companies to whom Tory was referring. Bell and Shaw, which owns Freedom Mobile, did not respond by deadline to The Logic’s requests for comment.

Tory is “asking companies potentially to breach their contracts and break the law,” said Michael Bryant, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Civil Liberties. “That’s not what’s supposed to happen ever, and actually, especially during an emergency, unless there is explicit legal authority to do this.”

Bryant said if the collection happened over the weekend, as Tory described it during the TechTO event, “it’s not legal, it’s not authorized.” The initiative “hasn’t passed the necessity test and, obviously, it’s completely disproportionate,” he said, noting that under provincial privacy laws, the city is required to identify an information gap, create a plan to get necessary data, obtain legal authority to do so and then gather it in a “proportionate way which minimizes the violation of privacy as much as possible” while notifying those involved.

Tory was responding to a question about what the thousands of attendees of the virtual event could do to help with efforts to combat the pandemic. “You all probably have ideas of similar data that your app … can produce for us,” he said. “You may not think it’s useful, but let us figure that out, because we just need more and more data about people’s habits, and about things and other applications you may think of that relate to everything from the shortage of personal protective equipment we have, through to compliance … with the orders that we’ve got to shut down and a host of other things.”