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Content type: Examples
In early July the Open Rights Group issued a pre-action legal letter to UK health secretary Matt Hancock and the Department of Health and Social Care saying they have breached requirements under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR by failing to conduct an impact assessment for the Test and Trace system. ORG and its lawyers, AWO, had been asking for details of the DPIA since the beginning of June, a few days after the system was launched. In their response, the DHSC’s lawyers said “there were…
Content type: Examples
Testing for All is helping small employers and individuals access antibody tests by making them available at £42 each out of fear that “testing inequality” could fuel greater financial inequality, as private schools and big businesses have introduced testing to allow pupils and employees to return to school and work but state schools and small businesses are left to rely on the state. Among the employers adopting antibody testing for staff are Credit Suisse, Ocado, and Premier League football,…
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Premier League football has set up a COVID-19 testing programme that it says should soon allow socially-distanced fans to return to stadiums using technology from a company called Prenetics, which is also delivering testing for the England cricket team. Prenetics’ digital health passport links an individual’s testing history to their mobile phone; a negative result generates a QR code supporters can scan to access venues.
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11661/12025028/premier-league-…
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
The UK government refused to abolish a coronavirus law even though it was used unlawfully in every one of the more than 50 cases that were prosecuted under it. Among those wrongly prosecuted were a woman who was fined £660 for a crime she hadn’t committed. Schedule 21 of the Coronavirus Act gives the police the power to direct “potentially infectious persons” to a place suitable for screening and assessment, and allows police to take them by force if they refuse, an infraction that attracts a…
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The work and pensions committee has said that the immigration rules that have left 1 million migrant workers in the UK at risk of destitution because they cannot claim universal credit should be suspended. The “no recourse to public funds rule” has left many foreign nationals facing a choice of stay at home in poverty or risking catching or spreading the virus at work. The exclusionary and opaque rules surrounding universal credit left many people, particularly self-employed workers, without…
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The pandemic has exacerbated the effects of the “hostile environment” on the UK’s undocumented migrants, many of whom have lost income, are working in unsafe and exploitative conditions, are scared to seek help even though the government has promised there will be no charging or immigration checks in diagnosing or treating COVID-19, and are living in overcrowded conditions.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/29/covid-19-worsening-plight-of-uk-migrants-report-finds and
https://…
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The UK Government outsourced some of the testing centre work to Deloitte. The contract states that Deloit does not have to share data of positive cases with the UK health authority Public Health England nor to local government authorities. This prevented data sharing that was arguably essential to public health surveillance.
https://twitter.com/johnharris1969/status/1278259630628618241
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/01/why-is-there-a-delay-in-sharing-covid-19-test-data-…
Content type: Examples
Both COVID-19 mortality and the economic impact of the virus-related closures are disproportionately affecting the UK’s ethnic minorities after taking age and location into account, exacerbating existing inequalities and reversing what had appeared to be progress. There are also concerns about child poverty and the effects on education for children from economically vulnerable families. There are some exceptions, such as the 4% of Indian men and 3% of Indian women who are medical doctors and…
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Hours before OpenDemocracy filed suit to compel the UK government to release all the contracts governing its deals with a list of technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Faculty, the UK government released the contracts. Faculty is being paid more than £1 million to provide AI services for the NHS, and the companies involved in the NHS data store project, including Faculty and Palantir, were originally granted intellectual property rights and were allowed to train…
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UK police reported to be planning separate contact tracing system
Police forces in the UK are planning their own contact tracing system because they are concerned that giving details to the national contact tracing system would compromise undercover operations and working methods. Options under discussion include having police forces take over all contact tracing for police officers and staff or seconding staff from the NHS test and trace system to police forces. Health officials, however, say…
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In the three months from March to May 2020 the UK government awarded at least £1.7 billion in contracts to private companies, most of them without a competitive tender process under emergency procurement measures put in place in March. A quarter of the 400 contracts that government departments have published have gone to companies that have not previously carried out government work, and at least seven were worth more than £100 million. The largest that has been published was a £234 million…
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The app-based track-and-trace system that was supposed to be in place in the UK by June 1 will not be working at full speed until September or October, and the chief executive of Serco, one of the main companies contracted to deliver it, doubted the system would evolve smoothly. Scientists have said that lockdown should not be eased until the track-and-trace system is well-established. Serco is responsible for recruiting 10,000 of the 25,000 contact tracers, and is being paid an initial fee of…
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Gypsy and Traveller communities in England, especially those living on canals and waterways or in unauthorised roadside encampments, have had no access to sanitation, refuse collection, or water for drinking, cooking, showering, and washing clothes during the coronavirus lockdown. Some local authorities have directed Travellers to public toilets without hand-washing facilities, while others tried to evict them. In addition, conditions like COPD and asthma are more common in Gypsy and Traveller…
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Within days of the announcement that the UK's new Joint Biosecurity Centre would be run by Tom Hurd, the Home Office's head of counter-terrorism, the government announced that instead it would be moved to the Department of Health and led by Clara Swinson, a senior health official responsible for global and public health. The JBC was intended to assess the pandemic threat on a colour-coded scale similar to that used for terrorism, but public health experts objected that the virus does not behave…
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Zoom said it would deliver end-to-end encryption as one of a number of security enhancements to its service, but it will only be available to enterprise and business customers whose identity they can verify and not on the free service. The company says it wants to be able to work with law enforcement in case people use Zoom for a "bad purpose". None of Zoom's competitors offer end-to-end encryption.
Source: CNBC
Writer: Jordan Novet
Content type: Examples
Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in England are 54% more likely than white people to be fined for violations of the coronavirus rules, according to an analysis of data published by the National Police Chiefs' Council showing the racial breakdown of the 13,445 fixed-penalty notices recorded between March 27 and May 11. BAME people were fined at a rate of 26 per 100,000, compared to white people at 16.8 per 100,000; the comparison raised questions as to whether the fines were fairly…
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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,…
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By the end of March 2021 Eurostar will roll out a facial verification system in which passengers will send a scan of their passport and a selfie so that when boarding they can prove their identity by walking through a camera-lined “biometric” corridor instead of presenting their documents. The Department for Transport is funding the system as part of a £9.4 million competition to revolutionise rail travel and is being developed by the British company iProov in partnership with Eurostar and the…
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The lives of residents in French and Scottish nursing homes have been put in danger by the homes’ use of Dahua and Hikvision fever scanning cameras. The homes are violating ISO standards for such cameras: they have been incorrectly installed in front of large windowed doors, the staff are not given sufficient time to acclimate after coming in from outdoors, and the cameras deliver incorrect readings when the forehead is obscured by hair or a hat.
https://ipvm.com/reports/hikua-nursing
Writer:…
Content type: Examples
Data-driven companies like Experian, CACI, and Xantura are pitching their services to help UK local officials to identify people in need. Xantura and CIPFA, the accountancy body for the public sector, have teamed up to deploy a £15,000 tool that uses local authority data including the NHS’s “shielded” list of individuals at extra risk from COVID-19 and other risk factors and demographic data to predict future needs for financial support and social care and assign risk for not only an individual…
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The UK government spent two months touting its contact tracing app as the prospective basis for returning to something close to normality. As the June 1 target date approached, however, the government increasingly downplayed its importance. In the meantime, Apple and Google’s API were adopted by several others countries that had intended, like the UK, to build their own, and a trial on the Isle of Wight failed to produce the download numbers or success rate the commissioning agency, NHSx, had…
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Seventeen of 93 UK prosecutions for breaches of emergency coronavirus laws in May were incorrect or for offences that did not exist. All but one of the 17 were stopped at the first court appearance. In total, nine prosecutions were brought under the Coronavirus Act; all were dismissed because there was no evidence the people concerned were potentially infectious, which is what the act covers. Of the 84 brought under the health protection regulations, four were withdrawn because they related to…
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After the CEO of NHSx told the the UK parliament that data harvested by the NHSx contact tracing app would be retained for future research, the UK Ministry of Defence said it would turn the data over to its Jhub to sanitise the data and remove all personally identifying information before passing it on to NHSx. The app was due for improvements to its security after the code was released on Github and the app was trialled on the Isle of Wight.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/20/…
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,…
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Greece has extended a coronavirus lockdown on its migrant camps for the fifth time. The move has prompted accusations that the government is using the pandemic to limit the migrants' movement.
The Greek Migration Ministry announced on Saturday that the country's migrant camps would remain under lockdown until at least July 19. The restrictions began over 100 days ago, on March 21.
"By a joint decision of the Ministers of Civil Protection, Health and Immigration and Asylum, the measures to…
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The findings of Freedom from Torture’s report, based on reviews of transcripts of asylum interviews carried out by the Home Office in 2017 or 2018 and a series of focus groups and interviews involving 25 torture survivors who had attended asylum interviews, shows they were often prevented from giving a full account of their experiences or denied the opportunity to explain their evidence.
The report states that some Home Office case workers were found to employ “poor questioning technique” and…
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Up to 30 charities and organisations have written to home secretary Priti Patel calling for a number of amendments on Tuesday - a year exactly until the scheme ends.
Under current arrangements, EU citizens have been told to apply by June if they wish to continue living and working in Britain.The letter said: “We are concerned that the government has not taken appropriate steps or made the adequate adjustments to the EUSS necessary to protect EU citizens and family members from Covid-19. We…
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Although the Home Office does not record ethnicity data for detainees, analysis of nationalities of those recently held within the immigration detention estate found that citizens from countries with predominantly black and brown populations are held for substantially longer periods than those from predominantly white countries.
Around a third – approximately a 1,000 – being held in immigration detention centres were freed at the height of the coronavirus pandemic to try and stop the spread of…
Content type: Examples
Immigration rules that have left 1 million migrant workers in the UK at risk of destitution because they cannot claim universal credit should be suspended on public health grounds during the pandemic, a cross-party group of MPs has recommended.
The work and pensions select committee said the no recourse to public funds (NRPF) rule – which hit the headlines recently when Boris Johnson appeared not to be aware of its existence – meant many foreign nationals faced a choice of staying at home in…