Is Canada Bad At Sharing Public Data? COVID-19 Rekindles An Old Debate | CBC News

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A debate that normally resides in the realm of wonkery roared to public attention this week, with Ottawa’s reluctance to release projections of the pandemic death toll. Is Canada bad at sharing public data? It’s a recurring obsession of journalists and researchers who use government data about things like health care, economics, crime and housing. By now, Americans haven’t just seen fatality projections. They have a one-stop site with estimates for all 50 states of how many deaths there might be, how many hospital beds and ventilators might be required,…

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Google’s COVID-19 Location Data Shows Regions That Are Violating Lockdown Orders. | Engadget

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Google has unveiled the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports in an effort to help public health officials understand how people are moving about in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The reports show location data from folks who have agreed to share their location history with Google in order to show places that are following instructions to shelter in place — or not. “As global communities respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing emphasis on public health strategies, like social distancing measures, to slow the rate of transmission,” wrote…

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Email, Text Message Attacks Surge During COVID-19 Crisis | CBC News

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Cybersecurity experts describe it as a perfect storm: employees working from home — away from their firm’s IT experts and sometimes without the protection of a corporate computer network —  and hungry for information about a mysterious coronavirus. With the COVID-19 crisis as the backdrop, fraudsters appear to be redoubling their efforts to steal information or money from unsuspecting users, sending fake emails and text messages as bait, in a scheme known as phishing. In one scam, fraudsters pretend to be processing EI claims, preying on Canadians who’ve recently lost their jobs.…

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‘Internet Is The Only Lifeline They Have’: Canada Needs To Confront ‘Digital Divide’ Amid COVID-19 Crisis | CBC Radio

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The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing Canada to confront many of its hidden social inequalities, one of these being unequal access to the internet, an internet freedom advocate says. Laura Tribe, executive director of OpenMedia, says disproportionate access to the internet is often talked about in terms of only affecting the North or remote communities, however, the current public health crisis has shown the problem is just as common in many cities. “There are so many people throughout the country — even in urban areas — that don’t have the internet…

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Broadband Speeds Fall In Dozens Of Big US Cities During Pandemic | Ars Technica

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Home-Internet download speeds have fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic in dozens of the biggest US cities as millions of Americans stay home due to school and business closures. However, typical download speeds remain high enough to support normal broadband-usage patterns, with the vast majority of cities still above the Federal Communications Commission’s 25Mbps standard. In 88 of the 200 most populous US cities, Internet users “experienced some degree of network degradation over the past week compared to the 10 weeks prior,” BroadbandNow said in a report released Wednesday. Of those,…

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How Will The Coronavirus End? | The Atlantic

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The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out. Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most…

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Governments Could Track COVID-19 Lockdowns Through Social Media Posts | CNET

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A research group scrapes more than 500,000 Instagram profiles in Italy to see if people abiding by the quarantine. The Italian government enforcing its nationwide lockdown measures to control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. Your posts on social media have been harvested for advertising. They’ve been taken to build up a massive facial recognition database. Now, that same data could be used by companies and governments to help maintain quarantines during the coronavirus outbreak. Ghost Data, a research group in Italy and the US, collected more than half a…

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Coronavirus Pandemic Changes How Your Privacy Is Protected | CNET

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Data protection officials around the world are loosening rules on how your data can be used during the COVID-19 outbreak. Privacy protections around the world are getting lifted during the coronavirus outbreak. As the coronavirus pandemic gets worse, privacy commissioners are lifting data restrictions for health officials to keep track of the outbreak. A review of policy changes around the world shows that data protection agencies are prioritizing lives over privacy, and it could be a sign of what’s to come for the US. In Hong Kong, the city’s privacy…

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Bell, Rogers, Other Telecoms Remove Internet Data Caps Amid COVID-19 | CTV News

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TORONTO — As Canadians grapple with a growing list of cancellations, closures and travel restrictions, several Canadian telecom companies are temporarily removing overage fees on home internet plans amid the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. In a statement issued Saturday, Bell Canada, which owns CTV News, announced it will waive any additional usage fees for residential internet customers, including Bell Aliant, Bell MTS and Virgin Home Internet services, until the end of April. “Any overage fees will be waived automatically, so customers don’t need to make any changes to their accounts,” the…

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Coronavirus Exposes Digital Disparities Between Students | Digital Trends

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With universities across the country closing their campuses, canceling classes, and moving everything online, the coronavirus pandemic has complicated learning for many students and faculty, despite the wide use of technology to keep classes going. Perhaps the most basic issue is what students will do when they do not have reliable high-speed internet access. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) doesn’t have accurate data on how many millions of Americans lack broadband, but Microsoft estimates it is likely far more than the 25 million people the government agency cited in a…

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