Privacy Office Unaware of Public Health’s Social Media Data Grab to Target Vaccine Hesitant

Privacy Commissioner of Canada Philippe Dufresne waits to appear before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, in Ottawa on Aug. 8, 2022. Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) said on Dec. 29 it was unaware of a Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) program to collect vast swaths of online data from Canadians to understand vaccine hesitancy and then target the individuals with tailored messaging to try to change their minds.

“I am not aware of any interactions between our Office and PHAC on this specific initiative,” said OPC spokesperson Tobi Cohen in a statement.

“We remind all institutions that the Privacy Act protects personal information even when it is publicly available, and that institutions are not allowed to collect personal information that is not directly related to an operating program or activity.”

The Epoch Times reported on Dec. 29 that PHAC has awarded a contract to social media intelligence collection firm Pulsar Platform to gather and analyze data on Canadians who are vaccine-hesitant.

Pulsar is a British company that PHAC says has a Canada-based research function.

Using this data, PHAC intends to build a messaging campaign that will specifically target certain groups it calls “communities of interest,” such as “indigenous peoples and millennial males.”

Afterwards, Pulsar will again collect data to measure the impact of the campaign.

The influence operation will not be the first, with PHAC having earlier conducted a “Fall Booster Campaign” on social media, the performance of which Pulsar as the new consultant has been tasked to assess.

Private Information

The publicly available documents related to the program, titled “Vaccination Confidence in Canada: Online Conversation and Audience Analysis,” do not mention that the information collected by the consultant should be anonymized before being provided to PHAC.

The statement of work (SOW) requires the consultant to conduct an analysis of vaccine-related conversations and their participants on Twitter and “social media channels, including Reddit, Blogs, Forums, and News, spanning up to three years of historical data.”

The SOW says that to help PHAC “better understand the vaccine landscape in Canada, the consultant must map the volume of vaccine hesitancy conversation and specific conversation pillars over a three-year period, identifying what and who is influencing and driving key peaks in conversation, and what messaging and actions generated a positive response.”

PHAC is asking the consultant to use various advanced tools to comb through the data, such as artificial intelligence to detect topics, sentiments, and emotions expressed within the text of a message, and keyword-based rules and natural language algorithms to structure the data into specific categories.

The consultant is also required to use network-mapping tools to assess audience sub-communities and demographics.

“Sub-communities are segmented based on interconnections (follower relationships) and then profiled based on their common affinities, demographics, and behaviors,” the SOW states.

PHAC’s endeavour to obtain data on vaccine-hesitant people’s online behaviours suggests that the consultant would need to access larger datasets of online activity amassed by aggregation firms in order to match that activity with the targeted social media profiles of individuals of interest.

The Epoch Times contacted PHAC regarding the program but did not receive a response.

Meanwhile the OPC has confirmed that its investigation into PHAC’s cellphone mobility tracking program is still underway after several complaints were previously filed.

It was revealed a year ago, in December 2021, that PHAC had been tracking the movements of Canadians—without their knowledge—through anonymized cellphone data obtained from private companies, and that the agency was seeking a contractor to access cellphone towers directly.

PHAC had used the data, in part, to assess Canadians’ compliance with lockdown orders, and it seeks to expand the use to other public health issues.

The House of Commons ethics committee told Parliament in May 2022 that Canadians should have the option to opt out of that data collection.