The Canadian government officially released COVID Alert, its exposure notification app, on Friday. Ontario is the first province to use it with plans to implement it in the Atlantic provinces and B.C. in the near future (other provinces may follow). I posted several tweets about the app, including one that received hundreds of likes and retweets indicating that I have installed it (the tweet included links to the Apple and Android versions of the app). Given the interest, this post expands on the tweet by explaining what the app does and doesn’t do and why I think the government has done a good job of addressing many associated concerns.
Archive for August, 2020

Law Bytes
Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
byMichael Geist

June 22, 2026
Michael Geist
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Michael Geist on Substack
Recent Posts
Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed
Blocked Twice: How Bill C-34’s Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Compound the Online News Act’s Harm to Young Canadians’ News Access
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy
The Data on Australia’s Social Media Ban: The Better the Privacy Protection, The Less Effective the Ban
Shaky Ground Gets Shakier: What the U.S. Supreme Court’s Location Data Decision Means for Bill C-22

