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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
Authorities in South Korea, which had been successful in containing the coronavirus early on due to its aggressive testing programme, began trying to trace more than 5,500 people who visited a group of bars between April 2 and May 6 because a single infected customer led to a new outbreak. More than 3,000, some of them for fear of being stigmatised as gay, remained out of reach while the number of cases rose to 101. Gay people have little protection in South Korea, and the news of the…
Content Type: Examples
The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh created a COVID-19 dashboard that displayed the names of at least 5,400 quarantined people, their device IDs and names, their OS version, app version codes, current GPS coordinates, and office GPS coordinates. Shortly after the dashboard's existence was posted on Twitter by a French programmer, MAP-IT, the state's IT centre in Bhopal that developed the system, replied that it had been taken down, saying the information was intended to be confidential.
Source…
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
The rush to incorporate greater safety from the coronavirus is bringing with it a new wave of workplace surveillance as companies install tracking software to determine who may have been exposed and which areas need deep cleaning if an employee gets infected; monitor social distancing; and use Bluetooth beacons embedded in badges to locate employees.
Companies are also installing thermal cameras to take employees' temperature as they enter the workplace or public area. Companies are also…
Content Type: Examples
Amazon has spent $10 million to buy 1,500 cameras to take the temperature of workers from the Chinese firm Zhejiang Dahua Technology Company even though the US previously blacklisted Dahua because it was alleged to have helped China detain and monitor the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities.
The cameras work by comparing a person’s radiation with a separate infrared calibration device and uses face detection technology to make sure it is looking for heat in the right part of the subjects…
Content Type: Examples
Moscow's first attempts to introduce digital methods by which residents could obtain digital passes to move around the city failed as the website collapsed numerous times and the app required them to get a pass for every single move rather than only to drive a car, as the government has stated. City authorities blamed DDoS attackers for the website problems and Muscovites' stupidity for the app issues and similar difficulties with SMS messages. There was also confusion over whether certain…
Content Type: Examples
The state of Utah gave the AI company Banjo real time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV, and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other data that the company says it's combining with information collected from social media, satellites, and various apps in order to detect anomalies in the real world and alert law enforcement to crimes as they are happening. The company claims its algorithm can do all this while stripping all personal data…
Content Type: Examples
The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI, which came to public attention for scraping billions of photos off social media sites to create a comprehensive facial recognition system, says it has offered to help US federal and three state agencies with contact tracing. The company claims its technology could use the cameras already in place to identify people in surveillance video in restaurants or stores where they may have come into contact with others who subsequently test…
Content Type: Examples
Six weeks after British prime minister Boris Johnson imposed a lockdown, many workers in non-essential jobs across many sectors of the economy were nonetheless being forced to continue working in potentially dangerous situations such as call centres, offices, factories, warehouses, and English construction sites as cleaners, security guards, warehouse workers, and office staff. It was left up to their bosses to decide whether or not they could work from home. The government's own statistics…
Content Type: Examples
At a cost to itself of £88,000 a week in salaries alone, Palantir has committed 45 engineers to a government data project intended to help predict surges in demand for the NHS during the pandemic. The company will be paid £1 a week for its work. Besides Palantir's work supporting the US Immigration Customs and Enforcement, a major concern is vendor lock-in that may make it difficult for NHSx to extract the insights Palantir helps it develop and move elsewhere.
https://tech.newstatesman.com/…
Content Type: Examples
The French government asked Apple to change the way its phones handle Bluetooth in order to accommodate the design of its contact tracing app. Downloading and installing the app will be voluntary, but the app will use a centralised design in which the data will be fed into a government server for processing.
Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/france-asks-apple-to-relax-iphone-security-for-coronavirus-tracking-app-development/
Writer: Charlie Osborne
Publication: ZDNet
Content Type: Examples
The International Press Institute has found that in both democratic and autocratic states the public health crisis has given governments the excuse of preventing the spread of disinformation to exercise control over the media, whether by criminalising journalism or controlling the public narrative and restricting access to information about the pandemic. The International Federal of Journalists has also found that three-quarters of journalists report that working conditions have deteriorated…
Content Type: Examples
In April, the US state of North Carolina's Dare County enacted a series of emergency declarations that establish checkpoints at all points where roads cross the county borders; travellers show an ID card with a Dare County address or a county-issued permit in order to enter the county. Dare County, which consists of barrier beaches and other islands on the Outer Banks of the coast, is served by only three roads in and out of the country, and all routes cross bridges or causeways. Because the…
Content Type: Examples
At least 27 countries are using data from cellphone companies to track the movements of their citizens, and at least 30 have developed smartphone apps for the public to download. Fewer objections have been raised in countries with greater levels of success in containing the virus. However, although Turkey has one of the worst outbreaks there has been little pushback against the surveillance even though the government is forcibly tracking people over 65, who are not allowed to leave their homes…
Content Type: Examples
In Colombia, Peru, and Panama, quarantine regulations assign men and women different days to go out. For transgender people, these gender-based restrictions mean discrimination and violence for law enforcement and others, leading to numerous complaints. In Bogota, where law enforcement has been instructed not to demand ID to prove gender and trans people are allowed to choose their day, one trans woman was stabbed by a man who said she was out on the wrong day, and another was blocked from…
Content Type: Examples
Civil Society advocates, including PI, expressed their dissaproval of a letter from the Colombian Data Protection Authority, which was intending to give a blank exception to the government in relation with handling the pandemic.
Link (in Spanish): https://web.karisma.org.co/organizaciones-de-la-sociedad-civil-rechazan-circular-de-la-sic-sobre-uso-de-datos-personales-para-controlar-la-pandemia/
Content Type: Examples
A number of incidents in which Zoom events in education settings were disrupted led the New York City school district to ban the use of Zoom for remote learning.
Among the Zoombombing incidents: saboteurs inserted racist and anti-Semitic messages into a virtual graduation ceremony at Oklahoma City University, displayed child abuse images for several seconds during a Brecksville-Broadview Heights School District Board of Education meeting, and displayed inappropriate material in a class in…
Content Type: Long Read
Covid Apps are on their way to a phone near you. Is it another case of tech-solutionism or a key tool in our healthcare response to the pandemic? It’s fair to say that nobody quite knows just yet.
We’ve been tracking these apps since the early days. We’ve been monitoring Apple and Google closely, have been involved in the UK’s app process, our partners in Chile and Peru have been tracking their governments’ apps, and more.
Of course privacy concerns arise. But only a simplistic analysis would…
Content Type: Examples
The Pakistani government has repurposed a system designed by the country's spy agency, inter-Services Intelligence for tracking down terrorists to trace suspected COVID-19 cases. Prime minister Imran Khan has said that efficient tracking and testing of coronavirus-infected people is the only way to reopen the country's closed businesses.
Source: https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/pakistan-government-isi-system-track-suspected-covid-19-cases-pm-imran-khan-1670378-2020-04-24
Writer: Press…
Content Type: Examples
Numerous efforts to create apps to help monitor and map the spread of COVID-19 rely on satnav-based location data from Galileo. The CovTrack app developed on a pro-bono basis by the Romanian company RISE, for example, uses Bluetooth connections between mobile phones to store identification data the user can access to very if any contacts have subsequently tested positive for COVID-19. CovTrack is a spin-off of the AGORA project for festival management, which is supposed by the European Space…
Content Type: Examples
Researchers at the University of Cape Town are developing the smartphone app COVI-ID to help the South African government track people who may not know they have contracted COVID-19, as well as people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive. The app will use Bluetooth and geolocation (via GPS, cellphone tower signals, and wifi) to collect the personal locations of users along with their infection status and store the information on the device using self-sovereign identity…
Content Type: Examples
Sweden's Lund University has launched an app intended to map the spread of the coronavirus across Sweden, a localised version of the JoinZOE COVID Symptom Tracker app pioneered in the UK, which the researchers believe could be coupled with seroprovalence testing in order to develop an accurate map of the the virus's spread. However, the Public Health Agency is sceptical about how useful the data will be, on the basis that it has its own data. The agency has halted work on on a digital tool that…
Content Type: Examples
The central Thailand province of Chachoengsao has launched Mor Channa, a COVID-19 tracking mobile phone app, to help individuals assess whether they are in a high-risk area for COVID-19. Energy Absolute PLC, one of the companies that helped develop the app, believes that the app's tracking system will provide real time data to the Ministry of Health's Department of Disease Control for analysis, and will keep people out of high-risk areas (indicated on the app's map in red) and therefore help…
Content Type: Examples
Turkey's Health Ministry has launched a smartphone app that allows people to self-report symptoms, provides information on nearby hospitals, pharmacies, supermarkets, and public transport stops, detects if the user has come into contact with others who pose a risk, and provides up-to-date information on the progress of the outbreak and efforts to counter it. The app was developed by the Health Ministry in cooperation with the country’s mobile phone operators and the Information and…
Content Type: Examples
Abu Dhabi’s Department of Health has released a new mobile app, "Stay Home", to ensure those asked to self-quarantine are abiding by the isolation rules. Everyone subject to quarantine is expected to download the app and create a user name and password; the user must also grant access to camera, media, location, audio, and calls. The app then sends alerts asking them to stay within their designated area and periodically sends notifications asking users to check by taking and sending a photo.…
Content Type: Examples
More than 3 million people in the UK have downloaded the JoinZoe COVID Symptom Tracker, which was designed by doctors and scientists at King's College London, Guys and St Thomas' Hospitals working in partnership with the health science company ZOE Global Ltd and endorsed by governments and NHS in Scotland and Wales, and supported by numerous UK health charities. The app asks for some basic information, including an email address, after which it asks you to check in once a day to say whether you…
Content Type: Examples
At least four law enforcement agencies in the US - two in California, and one in each of Maryland and Texas - are using drones to communicate with homeless people about maintaining social distance because encampments are located in areas that are difficult to access and police do not have to visit in person. Critics complain that the move increases encampment dwellers' already-high distrust in government. Many of the drones are being donated by the China-based drone company DJI as part of the…
Content Type: Examples
Hawaii governor David Ige has ordered all travellers to the island US state arriving between March 26 and May 31 to self-quarantine for 14 days. Violating the order is a criminal offence and subject to a $5,000 fine and up to a year's imprisonment. In addition, the Department of Transportation requires all travellers into Hawaii and (from April 1) between the Hawaiian islands to complete and sign a form giving their name, address, phone number, destination, and purpose of their travel.…
Content Type: Examples
A reverse-engineering analysis of Vietnam's official Bluetooth-based contact tracing app, Bluezone, which was developed by a coalition of local technology companies and the Ministry of Information and Communications, shows that the app is broadcasting a fixed six-character ID the app assigned to each installation. The app, which is intended to alert people who may have come into contact with the virus while preserving their anonymity, comes in both iOS and Android versions, and quickly…