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Content type: Examples
Germany’s contact tracing system is thought to have been critical in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, especially given superspreader events such as infections in meat packing plants. Each of Germany’s 16 federal states is responsible for health, and together with the national Robert Koch Institute they support authorities at city or council level, who are responsible for outbreak investigation and management, including contact tracing.
The country dubbed COVID-19 a notifiable disease early,…
Content type: Examples
A study describes the data transmitted to backend servers by the Google/Apple based contact tracing (GAEN) apps in use in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Denmark and finds that the health authority client apps are generally well-behaved from a privacy point of view, although the Irish, Polish, Danish, and Latvian apps could be improved in this respect. However, the study also finds that the Google Play Services component of the apps contacts Google servers as often as every 20 minutes…
Content type: Examples
Many of India’s informal workforce of 450 million people - 90% of the total workforce - were abruptly closed out of their places of employment when prime minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a lockdown in April. Left without pay, unable to stay in their living conditions, and with only limited train service available, many workers began walking back to their home states. Along the way, police are punishing them for failing to obey the quarantine and social distancing rules; others are dying…
Content type: Examples
Governments in Norway, Britain, Qatar, and India, among others, have had to either drop or remediate the contact tracing apps they’ve released to help combat the coronavirus due to the rush in which they were released. Many had security flaws that risked exposing user data; others pose privacy and security risks due to the amount of data they collect. While the apps may be helpful in countries like South Korea, where the medical infrastructure exists to do mass testing and isolation, digital…
Content type: Examples
Based on a recommendation by union home minister Amit Shah, in mid-June the Delhi government directed hospitals to issue covid-free certificates to patients when discharging them on the basis that they would help reduce the stigma around the disease and allow those who have recovered to go back to their normal lives. Patients were being discharged after recovery without confirmatory tests, and needed assurance that they were no longer contagious; the certificates would also ease travel by rail…
Content type: Examples
The Manchester-based cybersecurity company VST Enterprises is working a digital health company Circle Pass Enterprises to create the “Covi-pass” digital health passport intended to allow holders to work and travel safely. The Covi-pass uses a colour system of red, green, and amber to indicate whether the holder has tested positive or negative for the coronavirus, and holds other key information such as name, address, and age, plus a biometric. Despite the challenge of sourcing enough…
Content type: Examples
The German health minister, Jens Spahn, said the country required advice from the country’s ethics council before it could use the millions of antibody tests it had procured from the Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche to help determine how freely people could move around the country. Spahn cited the risk that people would try to get themselves infected if immunity passports appeared to promise greater freedom.
https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-germany-antibodies/armed-with-…
Content type: Examples
Between June 25 and July 6 India said officials would visit every household in New Delhi’s entire population of 29 million to record each resident’s health details and administer a COVID-19 test. In the meantime, police, along with surveillance cameras and drone monitoring, will enforce physical distancing and prevent the population from mixing inside the capital’s 200-plus containment zones. The move follows a spike in cases and the discovery of large clusters of cases in the capital that have…
Content type: Examples
At the end of March, jointly organised by the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s public health body), the German Centre for Infection Research, the Institute for Virology at Berlin’s Charite hospital, and blood donation services, researchers planned to begin conducting blood tests among the general public in order to determine how many people test positive for antibodies to the coronavirus. Gerard Krause, head of epidemiology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, and Brauinschweig,…
Content type: Examples
More than 2,500 foreign Muslims from 35 countries travelled to India to attend a mid-March gathering held with government permission at the Tablighi Jamaat headquarters in Delhi in mid-March. A day later the government issued a notice limiting events in Delhi to 50 people and a week later grounded all international flights grounded and, with just four hours’ notice, ordered a strict nationwide lockdown. More than 1,000 visitors were stranded in Tablighi Jamaat’s headquarters. However, numerous…
Content type: Examples
Germany’s “Corona-Warn” contact tracing app amassed 6.5 million users (7.8% of the German population) in the first 24 hours after its June 16 launch despite setbacks that included disputes over data privacy and functionality. The app was developed in six weeks by a team of developers and engineers from Deutcsche Telekom and SAP and is built on the Apple-Google notification framework. In a poll conducted by ARD around the time of the app’s launch, 42% of Germans said they would use the app,…
Content type: Examples
Any user of India's Aaorgya Setu contact tracing app can now request deletion of the data they've entered according to the Aaorgya Seta Emergency Data Access and Knowledge Sharing Protocol, 2020, which specifies the definition, collection, processing, and storage of the data the app collects. The protocol will be applicable for the next six months, and also increases the amount of time the data will be retained from 60 days to 180. IT ministry officials said the protocol was needed after a…
Content type: Examples
Local health authorities in Germany have relied on human contact tracers since the country confirmed its first COVID-19 cases early in 2020, and say that doing so has helped the country keep its death rate comparatively low even with a less restrictive lockdown than many other countries. Germany aims to have 16,000 contract tracers overall, or five for every 25,000 people. Tracing involves phoning each newly-diagnosed patient and asking their movements; those who have been in close contact for…
Content type: Video
A quick catch-up on the state of play of apps round the world - though we end up mostly discussing India and the UK - and we celebrate a very special birthday.
You can find a much deeper and more detailed look at the various questions and concerns around coronavirus apps on our website: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3792/covid-contact-tracing-apps-are-complicated-mess-what-you-need-know and all the latest news in our tracker https://privacyinternational.org/examples/tracking-…
Content type: Examples
After a call from a vendor, India's state-owned Broadcast Engineering Consultants Limited (BECIL) put out an expression of interest for electronic bracelets and accompanying software for use to ensure that COVID-19 patients do not violate their quarantine orders.
A hundred companies responded. BECIL saw the idea as an opportunity to sell a patient surveillance system to municipal corporations, private companies, welfare resident societies, and central government departments. BECIL, which was…
Content type: Examples
A security lapse exposed one of the core databases of the coronavirus self-test symptom checker app launched by India's largest cellphone network, Jio, shortly before the government lockdown began in late March.
The database, which had no password protection and contained millions of logs and records collected during the last two weeks in April, was found by security researcher Anurag Sen on May 1.
Some of the exposed records included individuals who answered a series of questions to create a…
Content type: Examples
Shortly after launch, security researcher Baptiste Robert discovered that India's contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu ("Health Bridge"), allows users to spoof their GPS location, find out how many people reported themselves as infected within any 500-metre radius, and mount a triangulation attack to confirm someone else's suspected positive diagnosis. The app, which was created by the government's National Informatics Centre, uses GPS to track people's movements rather than Bluetooth as many…
Content type: Examples
Our partners from the Centre for Internet & Society in India wonder themselves whether the use of an official chatbot to advance ‘right information’ is the most efficient way to handle misinformation?. In a recent example, a ministry released advisories on how homeopathy can prevent the coronavirus infection, which was proved to be false by many scientific sources. This heightens the problem of fake news or the spread of i.e. incorrect information as it comes from an official source.
Link…
Content type: Examples
The Indian authorities have said that the country's contact-tracing app, Aarogya Setu ("health bridge", in Sanskrit), will be voluntary - but mandatory for federal government employees, food delivery workers, and some other service providers. It may also be needed to access public transport and airports after the nationwide lockdown is lifted.
The app uses Bluetooth and location services to trace users' contacts, and keeps the personal data it collects on the phone, encrypted, until it is…
Content type: Examples
The Internet Freedom Foundation has sent a legal notice to the Broadcast Engineering Consultants India, Limited (BECIL), a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, calling on the organisation to modify a tender seeing procurement of a "Personnel Tracking GPS Solution" and "COVID-19 Patient Tracking Tool" intended for the organisation's employees.
IFF is concerned that the procurement items, while nominally intended to address health risks, will certainly…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli company Cellebrite, best known for providing hacking software to help law enforcement agencies get inside suspects' iPhones, is now pitching its technology to help authorities pull the location data and contacts off the phones of newly-diagnosed COVID-19 patients in order to "quarantine the right people", as the company emailed to the Delhi police force.
Cellebrite is one of at least eight surveillance and cyber-intelligence companies that are attempting to repurpose their…
Content type: Examples
Three days after announcing Germany would adopt the centralised Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) standard for contact tracing, the country's chancellery minister Helge Braun and health minister Jens Spahn announced they would instead use the decentralised approach backed by Apple, Google, and other European countries. While both standards rely on Bluetooth connections between nearby phones, PEPP-PT would have required Apple's cooperation to implement, and the company…
Content type: Examples
India's COVID-19 tracker app, Aarogya Setu, was downloaded 50 million times in the first 13 days it was available. Developed by the National Informatics Centre a subsidiary of the Ministry of Electronics and IT, the app is available on both Android and iOS smartphones, and uses GPS and Bluetooth to provide information on whether the phone has been near an infected person. Users provide a mobile number, health status, and other credentials, and must keep both location services and Bluetooth…
Content type: Examples
Germany's federal agency responsible for disease control and prevention, the Robert Koch Institute, has teamed up with the health technology start-up Thryve to develop an app called Corona-Datenspende ("data donation") that works with a variety of smartwatches and fitness wristbands. The app is designed to use the device's sensors to collect user data, and includes algorithms to it to spot symptoms linked to COVID-19 and help predict the spread and containment of the virus. More than 50,000…
Content type: Examples
The State Disaster Management Authority of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in collaboration with other government agencies, is developing tools to track the travel history of people who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus and those who are under quarantine at home. The COVID alerting tracking system alerts the authorities if any of the more than 25,000 people who have been placed under home quarantine moves more than 100 metres from their base location. The system tracks their…
Content type: Examples
The Indian medical AI start-up Qure.ai has released qScout, an AI-powered "virtual care platform". Intended to help governments, hospitals, and clinics, the qScout app is meant to identify high-risk individuals, assist with contact tracing, facilitate remote triage, read chest X-rays to identify possible infections, use geomapping to estimate population risk, and use real time data to allocate critical resources. The company claims the app is also capable of reading chest x-rays to detect…
Content type: Examples
The computer science department at IIT-Bombay has sent two proposals for mobile applications that can track quarantine violators to a variety of Indian public authorities including officials in the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, the Maharashtra state government, and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. The first, Corentine, is intended to geofence suspects and asymptomatic carriers, and Safe, which was previously used by IIT-Bombay students to register classroom attendance,…
Content type: Examples
On the second day of India's nationwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Karnataka government published the home addresses of quarantined residents, as a deterrent to breaking the rules. The list included individuals who had flown in from a foreign country and been asked to stay indoors for two weeks but who had not tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Although the government deleted a tweet announcing its intention, the list is still available on its website and is circulating…
Content type: Examples
On March 24 the German Bundestag passed a comprehensive amendment to the Infection Protection Act that authorises the Federal Ministry of Health to implement measures for medical care without the consent of the Federal Council. These include the ability to impose curfews and travel restrictions, override patent protection for medical products, and issue ordinances creating other exceptions to the law. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner criticised the proposals because he doubted whether…
Content type: Examples
Learning from countries like South Korea, government of the Indian state Karnataka has assigned its ten-member COVID-19 task force, which includes IAS officers with expertise in the fields of technology, medicine and healthcare, to develop a system to the approximately 40,000 people who visited foreign countries during the period of the Covid-19 outbreak as well as those who have tested positive and their contacts. The Corona Watch app, which gives details of the places visited by the 56 people…