The surveillance tool supplier Cy4Gate is pitching surveillance tools to track every citizen and their contacts to multiple governments around the world, including their own. In a demonstration of the system, Governments using the system, which Cy4Gate calls "Human Interaction Tracking System (HITS)
Israel's controversial NSO Group, which makes spyware that governments have used to target journalists and human rights activists, says it's in talks with Western governments to use its software to track the spread of the coronavirus. A demonstration, governments themselves, rather than NSO Group
The World Health Organization will partner with major blockchain and technology companies to launch a distributed ledger-based platform to be dubbed "MiPasa" that it says will facilitate "fully private information sharing between individuals, state authorities, and health institutions" by cross
8 europeans telecoms providers (Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange,Telefonica, Telecom Italia , Telenor, Telia and A1 Telekom Austria) have agreed to share mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Commission said it would use anonymsed data
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
The Mumbai police have been asked by the civic governing body to track the movements of people arriving at Mumbai airport through the GPS location of their phones. Arrivals at the airport in Mumbai are also being stamped with “Proud to protect Mumbaikars. Home quarantined” with the date until which
Bulgarian police forces have been authorised to request and obtain metadata from citizens' private communications from telephone and Internet operators. The powers are reportedly to be used to monitor those under compulsory quarantine, and will allow police to track their movement as well as
The Armenian National Assembly is considering identifying the contacts of people infected with Covid-19 through cell phone location data. The draft was tabled by the government. If approved, the operators of the public electronic communications networks will be obliged to provide information on
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
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 European Commission urged Europe's telecoms giants, including Deutsche Telekom and Orange, to share their users' mobile data streams from across the region to help predict the spread of the coronavirus "for the common good". In a letter in response, Dutch Renew MEP Sophie In't Veld stressed that
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
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
Researchers at Germany's Robert Koch Institute and Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute are working on an app that uses Bluetooth connections between smartphones and is compliant with GDPR to anonymously save the distance and duration of contact between people on the smartphone to make it possible to
Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics/KOMINFO official website) On Thursday, 26 March 2020, the Indonesian Minister of Communication and Informatics, Johnny G. Plate, issued the Ministerial Decree No. 159/2000 to facilitate the cooperation between the Government and telecommunication
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
