OTTAWA–No, the city of Toronto is not using mass surveillance to track the spread of COVID-19.

But should it be?

The coronavirus crisis is prompting a debate about civil liberties in a time of pandemic. Countries around the world — some democratic, others not — have either put in place or are considering tools of mass surveillance to track infected citizens and to notify those who came in contact with them.

The methods vary but the goal is the same: to slow the spread of COVID-19 and enforce bans on public gatherings as governments urge citizens to practise social distancing.

There was briefly some concern that it was already happening in Toronto. On Monday, the website The Logic reported that Mayor John Tory told a TechTO audience that the cellphone companies had “given us all the data ... pinging off their network on the weekend so we could see” where citizens were still congregating.

On Tuesday, Tory told the Star he had misspoken.

“I made it sound like it was happening, not knowing it wasn’t happening,” he said, adding that he had raised the idea casually but hadn’t spent time considering it deeply or putting it in use.

“The city of Toronto will not be using cellphone location data, nor does it have such data, to determine where people are not practising physical distancing,” city spokesperson Brad Ross added in a written statement.

But Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have left open the door to more invasive surveillance techniques in order to enforce their requests for Canadians to stay at home to slow the pandemic’s spread.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Trudeau said tracking citizens by their cellular traffic “is not something we are looking at now,” but reiterated that “all options are on the table” in federal efforts to combat COVID-19.

“I think we recognize that in an emergency situation we need to take certain steps that wouldn’t be taken in non-emergency situations,” Trudeau said when asked about telecommunications surveillance.

Civil liberties advocates have raised questions about the efficacy of cellphone tracking to slow the pandemic, and the potential costs of giving security and law enforcement agencies that kind of power.

“It’s really important not to indulge in knee-jerk reactions against leveraging data technology to surveil disease, but we need to be realistic about where more data collection … actually supports accountable decision making, and where it will hurt human rights and more fundamentally human dignity,” said Brenda McPhail, the director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s privacy, law and surveillance project.

“There are a lot of ways that data-driven surveillance can cross that line between necessary and helpful to disproportionate … Is it untargeted? Is it indiscriminate? Is it inappropriately constrained?”

Whether mass surveillance is an effective tool in slowing the spread of COVID-19 is also a complicated question, said Christopher Parsons of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.

Law enforcement agencies are already able to track cellphone traffic in a given area by a process known as “tower dumps.” That’s when an agency requests data for all the traffic that crossed a specific cellular tower or group of towers.

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But Parsons, who researches surveillance technology and methods, said he’s unaware of any existing systems that can be used for Canada-wide mass cellphone surveillance.

“Any (lawful interception) system that’s currently been set up for law enforcement use, I suspect … would not scale to the population level immediately,” Parsons told the Star on Tuesday.

“So there are going to be some limitations in scaling all of this up, to say nothing of the fact that … most services and technologies of this nature haven’t been tested at this scale, so all sorts of wonderful problems could crop up should the Government of Canada compel telecommunications to start doing that,” he said.

If the goal is to discourage large gatherings or notify people they may have come into contact with someone who has contracted COVID-19, there may be more efficient, proven and low-tech ways government can do that.

Some countries in which mass surveillance is used appear to have had early success in using it to slow the virus’s spread.

China, the epicentre of COVID-19, resorted to cellphone tracking to restrict citizen movements.

Singapore put in place extensive testing, as well as surveillance and quarantine measures that employed closed-circuit television and contact-tracing teams, the Financial Times reported . The city-state’s government also released an app called “TraceTogether,” which uses Bluetooth technology to measure people’s distance from each other and length of contact, then transmits that data to health officials.

South Korea, Israel, Italy, and some U.S. states have taken what would normally be considered extreme steps to analyze and limit citizens’ movements, the New York Times reported.

The debate appears to be a philosophical one in Canada for the moment. Bell Canada and Rogers Communications told the Star that they have not transferred subscriber information to governments, and Telus Communications has told other media the same.

“We haven’t been asked by any governments for this kind of support,” Bell spokesperson Nathan Gibson said in a brief written statement.

“But (Bell) would consider it if it helps in the fight against COVID-19 while respecting privacy laws.”