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Content type: Examples
Thousands of Israelis have been ordered into quarantine without any right of appeal based on cellphone tracking that may be wrong because phone geolocation is insufficiently fine-grained to tell the difference between two people being in the same room and being separated by a door when dropping off and receiving a food delivery. Numerous agencies are performing the kind of tracking formerly carried out only by the domestic security agency, Shin Bet. Among them are Shin Bet itself, which is…
Content type: Examples
Israel intends to deploy a cellphone tracking system developed in Taiwan by Chunghwa Telecom, which launched it on February 1 in Taiwan, where it was used to track the subscribers of Taiwan's five network operators. To begin, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control compiled a list of people who need to be placed in quarantine or home isolation after coming into close contact with COVID-19 patients or travellers returning from high-risk countries. After local health and civil affairs departments…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli defense minister, Naftali Bennett, has published a plan under which civilian companies including the controversial company NSO Group would cooperate with the defence establishment to fight the novel coronavirus after a sharp rise in reported cases indicated that existing methods of contact tracing and geolocation were no longer effective at tracing all the people a patient might have infected. Under Bennett's proposal, the collaborators would build a system into which the…
Content type: Examples
The Argentinian company Urbetrack is developing a "Cuidate en casa" (Take Care of Yourself at Home) app that it will pitch to government agencies throughout the country. The goal is to contribute to remediating the health crisis by helping enforce quarantine. The plan is that users will download the app and complete a form with their personal details as chosen by the local authority. The app will then generate a "radial geofence" defined by the local authority, within which the user must stay.…
Content type: Examples
The Argentinian Ministry of Transport, working with the state-owned satellite company ARSAT and the telecoms regulator,ENACOM, proposed to the Executive on 31 March 2020 a platform that uses cell tower data to track people on public transport and ensure they comply with quarantine laws. By 28 March, the Ministry of Security had detained 13,006 people for violating the rules. The government believes that although compliance is high, it will deteriorate if quarantine is extended much longer…
Content type: Examples
The San Francisco-based big data company Grandata has created a heat map to show which areas of Argentina are best complying with the quarantine lockdown. Grandata used an "anonymised" dataset collected from apps that provide third parties with geolocation information. The heat map shows if an individual has moved more than 100 meters from the place where they spend most of their time, apparently without taking into account the socio-economic contexts of different cities, where individuals…
Content type: Examples
Argentina's Public Prosecutor's Office will start installing an app on the smartphones of those who violate government-ordered quarantine in the cities of Santa Fé and Rosario. The app will be installed by the province's Criminal Investigation Agency to track those who are under criminal investigation for violating quarantine. The app will send reports to the the MPA investigation office and coordinated by the Attorney General's Office. Individuals will be required to sign a document…
Content type: Examples
On March 23, Argentina's immigration agency, Dirección Nacional de Migraciones (DNM), announced that anyone arriving in the country would be required to install the free COVID-19 Ministry of Health app on their phone for 14 days to ensure they comply with quarantine rules in order to protect the population. The Office of the Chief of Staff had instructed the DNM to adopt this policy when it launched the app, also on March 23. Since launch, the number of unnecessary permissions the app requests…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli Ministry of Health's mobile app, "The Shield", is intended to alert users if they have been at a location in Israel at the same time as a known COVID-19 patient.
The app, which is available for both Android and iOS, works by collecting the GPS and WiFi network (SSID) information of a user's mobile device throughout the day. This data is saved only on the mobile device and is not transmitted to the Ministry of Health, other government agencies, or any organisation. The locations…
Content type: Examples
In response to a case brought by the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), the Arab Joint List, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a temporary injunction on March 19 limiting the the state's and the Shin Bet security service's use of cellphone surveillance, among others, to track and monitor COVID-19 patients and trace their contacts. The court indicated it will ban the programme unless a parliament oversight committee is…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has authorised the country's internal security agency to use a previously secret tranche of mobile phone geolocation data, gathered to combat terrorism, to retrace the movements of individuals with confirmed cases of the coronavirus and identify people they've interacted with who should be quarantined. After Parliament's Secret Services Subcommittee ended its discussions without approving the measure, Netanyahu said the government would approve…
Content type: Examples
Ministers have permitted the Shin Bet security service to "use the cellular phone data of carriers of the disease to retrace their steps and identify anyone they may have infected", and will relay the information to the Health Ministry, which will send a message to those who were within two meters (6.6 feet) of the infected person for 10 minutes or more, telling them to go into quarantine. An update to the original order has extended the period during which it is in force from 30 days until the…