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Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
Because tracking and limiting the movement of those suspected to be carrying COVID-19 carriers has been a factor in flattening the exponential curve of cases in places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, Professor Marylouise McLaws, a technical advisor to the WHO's Infection Prevention and Control Global Unit and a professor at the University of New South Wales, believes that we should use travellers' smartphones to electronically monitor their compliance with self-isolation orders. …
Content type: Examples
16th April 2020
The Department of Health in the US state of Kansas is tracking residents' locations via a platform called Unacast, which compares aggregated GPS mobile phone data from before and after the implementation of social distancing and grades each county on its compliance. As of April 1, 45 of 105 Kansas counties had received an F rating, and the state as a whole had managed a C. Unacast says the data it has access to is updated every other day and publishes updated ratings on all 50 US states.…
Content type: Examples
12th April 2020
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in conjunction with local and state governments, are using location data collected by the mobile advertising industry from millions of cellphones in order to better understand how Americans are moving during the COVID-19 pandemic and how those movements affect the spread of the disease. The goal is to create a portal that federal, state, and local officials can use to study geolocation from up to 500 US cities and see which retail…
Content type: Examples
1st April 2020
In a widely circulated animated heat map, the geospatial visualisation company Tectonix GEO in partnership with the location technology company X-Mode used the secondary locations of anonymised mobile devices that were active on a single beach in in Ft Lauderdale, FL during spring break to show how the beach-goers fanned out across the US afterwards, potentially carrying infection with them. Although the visualisation was instructive in showing how contagion spreads, it was unclear whether any…
Content type: Examples
UK: O2 shares aggregated location data with government to test compliance with distancing guidelines
21st March 2020
Mobile network operator O2 is providing aggregated data to the UK government to analyse anonymous smartphone location data in order to show people are following the country's social distancing guidelines, particularly in London, which to date accounts for about 40% of the UK's confirmed cases and 30% of deaths. The project is not designed to monitor individuals. Lessons from the impact on London of travel restrictions could then be applied in the rest of the country. The government says it has…
Content type: Examples
21st March 2020
BT, owner of UK mobile operator EE, is in talks with the government about using its phone location and usage data to monitor whether coronavirus limitation measures such as asking the public to stay at home are working. The information EE supplies would be delayed by 12 to 24 hours, and would provide the ability to create movement maps that show patterns. The data could also feed into health services' decisions, and make it possible to send health alerts to the public in specific locations.…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
Researchers at the University of Oxford are working with the UK government on an app similar to the smartphone tracking system China developed to alert people who have come in contact with someone infected with the coronavirus. The British app, which would be associated with the country's National Health Service,, would rely on the public volunteering to share their location data out of a sense of civic duty rather than, as in China, compulsion. The service would not publish the movements of…
Content type: Examples
28th April 2020
The Turkish Health Ministry's Pandemic Isolation Tracking Project is using mobile device location data to track patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and ensure they obey the government's quarantine requirements. Violators will be sent warning messages and their information will be shared with the police if they do not return to isolation. Law enforcement officers can access individuals' information during road stops. Before launching the system, the Communications Directorate obtained permissions…
Content type: Examples
3rd May 2018
As GPS began being increasingly incorporated into smartphones, satnav manufacturers like the Dutch company TomTom were forced to search for new revenue streams. In 2011, TomTom was forced to apologise when the Dutch newspaper AD reported that the company had sold driving data collected from customers to police, which used it to site speed cameras in locations where speeding was common. TomTom said that any information it shares had been anonymised; however, in response to the newspaper story…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
Thailand's National Broadcasting and Telecommunication Commission (NBTC) provided a SIM card to every foreigner and Thai who had travelled from countries that have have been designated as "high risk" for COVID-19 infections (at the time, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Italy, and Macau). According to NBTC secretary-general Thakorn Tanthasit, the AoT Airports' new application had more than 7,000 downloads in its first five days. The sim card will be used together with the AoT Airports application…
Content type: Examples
28th April 2020
When the phone belonging to an American University student in Taiwan, who was subject to 14 days' quarantine after returning from Europe, ran out of battery power, in less than hour he had received phone calls from four different local administrative units, a text message notifying him he would be arrested if he had broken quarantine, and a visit from two police officers. The phone tracking system uses phone signals to triangulate locations of the more than 6,000 people subject to home…
Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
Taiwan, linked by direct flights to Wuhan, moved to contain the virus as soon as reports of the Wuhan outbreak emerged. At the end of January, it suspended flights from China, and integrated its national health database with its immigration and customs information in order to trace potential cases. This enabled the country to send text messages to every phone on the island listing every restaurant, tourist site, and destination passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship visited during shore…
Content type: Examples
25th March 2020
According to information collected by Le Temps, telco Swisscom will use SIM card geolocation data to communicate to federal authorities when more than 20 phones are detected in an 100 square meters area. Gathering of more than 5 people are forbidden in Switzerland since March 21.
Data collected by the telco should theoretically only come from public areas and not private building. This data will be anonymised and aggregate before being passed to the health authorities (Office fédéral de la…
Content type: Examples
28th April 2020
By May 11, the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health, working with EFPL and ETH Zurich, will launch a secure, decentralised system for contact tracing developed by the Decentralised Privacy-Preserving-Proximity Tracing (DP-3T) international consortium, whose Swiss partners are Ubique and PocketCampus. Other international partners include UCl, KU Leuven, TU Delft, the University of Oxford, and the Universirty of Torino. The system has been posted to Github as an open source protocol and will…
Content type: Examples
8th April 2020
The global secure solutions integrator SuperCom has begun piloting a modified version of the company's PureHeath platform, which incorporates a specially designed "PureCare" smartphone and "PureTag" ankle bracelet, aimed at ensuring that people comply with quarantine requirements during the coronavirus pandemic. The expectation is that the smartphones, which are easier to distribute at scale, will be used widely, while the ankle bracelets will be reserved for high-risk individuals. The company…
Content type: Examples
1st April 2020
Although the alerts about contacts with people infected by the coronavirus sent out via SMS by the South Korean government do not include names, the information included about people who tested positive for coronavirus, and their past locations can be revealingly detailed in some cases. Those who have been identified by this means have suffered offline and/or online harassment; others, without being specifically identified by name, have been mocked. A survey has found that as a result people…
Content type: Examples
12th April 2020
On March 9, SK Telecom began providing South Korea's Gyeongbuk Provincial Police Agency with its Geovision population analysis service and GIRAF platform. The company claims that the combination can analyse mobile geolocation data across the country in real time, create visualisations, and show how many people are in 10x10 metre lattices, enabling police to send officers where they're needed to enforce distancing measures. The company is in talks with the Korean National Police Agency to expand…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
The "safety guidance texts" sent by health authorities and district offices in South Korea are causing information overload and have included embarrassing revelations about infected people's private lives. A text may include, for example, a link to trace the movements of people who have recently been diagnosed with the virus. Clicking on the link takes the user to the website of a district office that lists the places the patient had visited before testing positive. In one case, a man in his…
Content type: Examples
19th March 2020
With 6,300 COVID-19 cases and more than 40 reported deaths, the South Korean government launched a smarphone app (Android first, iPhone due on March 20) to monitor citizens on lockdown as part of its "maximum" action to contain the outbreak. The app keeps patients in touch with care workers and uses GPS to keep track of their location to ensure they don't break quarantine. The government said the tracking was essential to manage the case load (at the time, 30,000 people) and prevent "super…
Content type: Examples
1st April 2020
The success of South Korea's efforts to combat the coronavirus without a national lockdown and without suspending civil rights depended in part on preparation put in place after the 2015 MERS epidemic and in part on the country's network of private testing labs, which enabled the country to quickly set up drive-in testing, with the results rapidly texted back to mobile phones. Positive results set in motion aggressive contact-tracing incorporating CCTV footage, mobile phone tracking data, and…
Content type: Examples
2nd April 2020
South Africa's Communications Minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has stated that telecommunications operators in the country have agreed to provide location data to identify how many people have been infected in a particular area. The Government has broad powers under a national state of disaster.
Writer: Philip de Wet
Publication: Business Insider
Content type: Examples
12th April 2020
The government has issued a substantial rewrite of a controversial proposal to track people using their phones and other devices in the bid to contain Covid-19. AmaBhungane, an investigative journalism newsroom, said the first “directions” – issued last week by the minister of communications – raised "serious concerns for their vagueness and lack of privacy protections”. The new regulations provide more judicial oversight, restrict the purpose to contact tracing, and aim to ensure that…
Content type: Examples
28th April 2020
The regulations brought in to curb the spread of COVID-19 in South Africa included directions published by the minister of communications and digital technologies that critics claimed violated the country's constitution. On the plus side, the regulations ordered service providers to ensure continued provision of internet and telecommunications services, and enabled temporary licensing of spectrum bands, which could increase internet capacity. However, the regulations also make publishing a…
Content type: Examples
12th April 2020
The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research will partner with Telkom and Samsung to create a track and trace system specifically for the South African context, which includes high levels of economic inequality, poverty, and overcrowding. The system will collate data sources such as GIS in order to track those who may be infected and those whom they may expose to the virus. In some communities, the Department of Health…
Content type: Examples
1st April 2020
A newly-enacted Slovakian law, inspired by similar laws in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, allows the country's Public Health Office to use location data from mobile phones to track people ordered to quarantine to ensure they are not breaking the rules. The angry public response on privacy grounds forced the government to clarify: it will only collect limited data and use it only in connection with the coronavirus outbreak, the data will only be accessible by the Public Health Office; and…
Content type: Examples
26th March 2020
The new Singaporean app, TraceTogether, developed by the Government Technology Agency in collaboration with the Ministry of Health was launched on March 20 after eight weeks of development. The app, which can be downloaded by anyone with a Singapore mobile number and a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone, asks users to turn on Bluetooth and location services, and enable push notifications. The app works by exchanging short-distance Bluetooth signals between phones to detect other users within two…
Content type: Examples
12th April 2020
With more than 71,000 Serbian citizens returning to the country, primarily from Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, the government has introduced systems to ensure they obey the country's self-isolation rules. The government monitors telephone numbers, especially Italian ones, and pays special attention to communities with a large influx of people from elsewhere.
https://advox.globalvoices.org/2020/03/30/covid-19-pandemic-adversely-affects-digital-rights-in-the-balkans/#
Source: https://…
Content type: Examples
7th April 2020
The whistleblower said they were unable to find any legitimate reason for the high volume of the requests for location information. “There is no other explanation, no other technical reason to do this. Saudi Arabia is weaponising mobile technologies,” the whistleblower claimed.
The data leaked by the whistleblower was also seen by telecommunications and security experts, who confirmed they too believed it was indicative of a surveillance campaign by Saudi Arabia.
The data shows requests for…
Content type: Examples
22nd March 2020
Russia has set up a coronavirus information centre to to monitor social media for misinformation about the coronavirus and spot empty supermarket shelves using a combination of surveillance cameras and AI. The centre also has a database of contacts and places of work for 95% of those under mandatory quarantine after returning from countries where the virus is active. Sherbank, Russia's biggest bank, has agreed to pay for a free app that will provide free telemedicine consultations.
Source: …
Content type: Examples
16th April 2020
The city of Moscow is planning to use smartphone geolocation functions to track foreign tourists' movements through the city to prevent outbreaks of COVID-19 after Russia reopens its borders. Moscow accounts for two-thirds of all cases in the country. Moscow City Hall is considering a system that would provide daily updates on tourists' movements using their SIM card data and show when residents come into contact with them; it is already buying location data from Russia's three biggest telecom…