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Content type: Examples
The algorithm and mathematical model used to predict students’ grades by the International Baccalaureate programme, which was forced to cancel exams because of the pandemic, incorporated three elements: coursework, teachers’ predictions of their students’ exam grades, and “school context”, which was based on historical teacher grade predictions (which universities use for provisional acceptances) and the school’s historical performance on each subject’s coursework. The result was to penalise…
Content type: Examples
As part of efforts to make returning to campus safer, US universities are considering or implementing mandates requiring students to install exposure notification apps, quarantine enforcement programs, and other unproven new technologies, risking exacerbating existing inequalities in access to both technology and education. In some cases, such as Indiana University, UMass Amherst, and the University of New Hampshire, universities are requiring students to make a blanket commitment to install…
Content type: Examples
A preliminary study finds that facial recognition algorithms struggle to identify people wearing masks. The study tested 89 commercial facial recognition algorithms, and the best had error rates between 5% and 50% in matching unmasked photos with photos of the same person wearing a digitally-applied mask. Masks both lowered the algorithms’ accuracy rates and raised the number of failures to process. The more of the nose is covered by the mask the lower the algorithm’s accuracy; however, error…
Content type: Examples
Manchester-based VST Enterprises is developing a rapid COVID-19 testing kit intended to help restart stadium sporting events. The results of tests, which fans will take the day before the event they wish to attend and provide results within ten minutes, will be stored in VSTE’s V-Health Passport, a secure mobile phone app into which users enter their name, address, date of birth, phone number, and doctor information, plus a scanned official identity document against which the smartphone can…
Content type: Examples
By mid-July, the UK’s contact tracing system was still failing to contact thousands of people in areas with England’s highest infection rates. In London, with the sixth-highest infection rate in England, only 47% of at-risk people were contacted; in partially locked-down Leicester, the rate was 65%. The govt’s SAGE committee has said that 80% of infected people’s contacts just be contacted and told to self-isolate within 48 to 72 hours for the programme to be effective. Local councils are…
Content type: Examples
A gap in government guidance means that thousands of legal migrant key workers could be forced to choose between following new public health laws and destitution, according to Labour MPs and charities.
They are warning that no recourse to public funds (NRPF) conditions, which apply to roughly 1.4 million legal non-EEA migrants in the UK, could exclude thousands from the government’s new Test and Trace support programme, including many key workers.
They say the rules call into…
Content type: Examples
The Home Office moved dozens of asylum seekers involved in a Covid outbreak more than 120 miles despite an enforcement order saying they should remain in self-isolation for 14 days, the Guardian has learned.
Home Office contractors have been accused of being “beyond reckless” in their handling of the initial outbreak.
Among those who were moved despite the instruction to self-isolate, at least nine people were found to have Covid following testing, although the Home Office had initially said…
Content type: Examples
Migrants seeking asylum in Britain could be processed offshore under plans being developed by Priti Patel. Officials have ruled out Ascension Island and St Helena as impractical because of their distance from the UK but the Home Secretary is still seeking a third country where asylum seekers could be held while their applications are processed.
Sources close to Ms Patel countered criticism of the proposal by citing similar plans by Tony Blair when he faced a surge in illegal migrants crossing…
Content type: Examples
Thousands of asylum seekers currently accommodated in hotels are facing removal from the UK, the Home Office has announced.
A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Independent, states that evictions of refused asylum seekers will take place “with immediate effect” and charities have reported an increase in people being held in immigration detention centres.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/19/home-office-plans-to-evict-thousands-of-refused-asylum-seekers
Writer: Diane…
Content type: Examples
By late June, two months after its launch, Australia’s A$1.5 million CovidSafe app had failed to help authorities identify even a single contact of a confirmed case. In the states of Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania the app had not picked up any contacts that had not already been identified by human contact tracers, and in Western Australia and Queensland no confirmed cases had downloaded the app. In Victoria, where the virus has been spreading, only just over 30 of 568…
Content type: Examples
By the end of its first three weeks of availability, the French contact tracing app, “StopCovid”, had seen 1.9 million downloads. Of these, only 68 people had entered a positive COVID-19 test result, and only 14 were notified that they might have been exposed, according to the French junior minister for digital affairs, Cédric O. He attributed the app’s uninstallation by 460,000 people to a “decline in concern” about the epidemic in France.
https://www.politico.eu/article/french-contact-…
Content type: Examples
In late May, Florida fired Rebekah Jones, its geographic information system manager and architect of the state’s COVID-19 data and surveillance dashboard. The dashboard was praised on TV two weeks earlier by Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force for its accessibility and transparency. A spokeswoman for Florida governor Ron DeSantis blamed Jones’s firing on “insubordination”. A week before, across the state line in Atlanta, Georgia, the…
Content type: Examples
Lovelace Women’s Hospital in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the only medical institution in the state dedicated to women’s health, operated a secret policy of separating First Nation mothers, whom they identified either by appearance or by residence in a particular zip code, from their newborn babies as a “preventative measure” against spreading COVID-19. Normally, the hospital gave expectant mothers temperature checks and asked questions about whether they had been in contact with an infected person…
Content type: Examples
Los Angeles Airport (LAX) has begun the first of two six-week voluntary trials in which travellers walk past fever-detecting cameras before reaching security. Those who show a temperature above 100.4F will be taken aside for secondary screening. During the pilot no one will be stopped from travelling, although airlines may do their own temperature screening and can stop feverish travellers from flying. The goal of the pilot is to test the technology’s accuracy and capability, and is using three…
Content type: Examples
The UK government has instructed bars, restaurants, hairdressers, and churches to record visitors’ contact details when they begin to reopen on July 4 so they can be contacted later if necessary for contact tracing and testing. However, the industry was given no guidance on how to take care of the potentially sensitive data. The ICO said it would monitor developments and assess the data protection implications. Experience in other countries has shown there are risks of abuse by staff.
Source:…
Content type: Examples
A study of 17 Android mobile contact tracing apps from 17 different countries found that most government-sponsored contact tracing apps are insecure and risk exposing users’ privacy and data. The researchers used the presence or absence of six basic hardening techniques: name obfuscation (just one app of the 17), string encryption (29%), asset/resource encryption (6%), class encryption (6%), root detection (41%), and emulator detection (18%) as indicators of the overall level of in-app security…
Content type: Examples
In March the Dutch government announced that a contact tracing app would become the core of its testing policy. Of the 750 proposals it received in response to its open tender, 63 were long-listed; however, none of the seven finalists met the privacy and security criteria. Research simulating the effects of different policy measures found that random testing could in some cases be more effective and require fewer tests than the level of testing required for a contact tracing app to work. The…
Content type: Examples
Fifty experts have collaborated to produce best practice advice for wastewater surveillance to detect the genetic signal of SARS-CoV-2, a technique which is rapidly evolving but has been shown in tests to be am effective in acting as an early indicator of disease emergence and helping track disease prevalence in order to support risk management. The advice includes how to design systems for collection and preservation of samples, how to quantify the SARS-CoV-2 signal, and research opportunities…
Content type: Examples
New York City’s contact tracing system got off to a shaky start; in its first two weeks only 35% of the 5,347 residents who tested or were presumed positive for the coronavirus gave information about close contacts to tracers, rising slightly to 42% in the third week. Encouragingly, however, almost everyone for whom the city had phone numbers answered. The city hopes to have more success as the programme becomes more established and when contact tracers start visiting people’s homes.
https://…
Content type: Examples
Corruption scandals have added to Latin America’s challenges in dealing with the coronavirus. In Ecuador, prosecutors identified a criminal ring that colluded with health officials to sell body bags to hospitals at 13 times the normal price, and many others are accused of price-gouging for other medical supplies.
The former Bolivian health minister is under house arrest awaiting trial on corruption charges, government officials in seven Brazilian states are under investigation for misusing…
Content type: Examples
A new requirement to wear wear masks in public in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus poses a problem in France and Belgium, where laws prohibit wearing face coverings, with health as the only allowed exception.
In France, where the law was passed in 2010, between 2011 and 2017 1,830 Muslim women were fined for wearing veils and 145 were warned. The law does not state how to distinguish when face coverings are worn for health reasons rather than religious belief.
This leaves…
Content type: Examples
Germany’s contact tracing system is thought to have been critical in controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, especially given superspreader events such as infections in meat packing plants. Each of Germany’s 16 federal states is responsible for health, and together with the national Robert Koch Institute they support authorities at city or council level, who are responsible for outbreak investigation and management, including contact tracing.
The country dubbed COVID-19 a notifiable disease early,…
Content type: Examples
In the second week of operation of the UK’s contact tracing system a quarter of people who tested positive for COVID-19 could not be reached because they had not supplied phone numbers or email addresses. Of the close contacts whose details were provided, contact tracers reached 90.6% to advise them to self-isolate. Data from the first week also showed that only 75% of contactees could be reached within the target 24 hours; contact was made with another 13.6% within 48 hours, and another 8.6%…
Content type: Examples
The US National Basketball Association’s plan to restart its season includes isolating players and other personnel at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida with a plan for frequent testing, quarantine protocols, and bracelets that beep if people come within six feet for too long. In addition, the NBA proposed to give players the option of wearing Oura smart rings after a study showed the physiological data they collect could, in combination with information collected from other wearers via in-…
Content type: Examples
France has been testing AI tools with security cameras supplied by the French technology company Datakalab in the Paris Metro system and buses in Cannes to detect the percentage of passengers who are wearing face masks. The system does not store or disseminate images and is intended to help authorities anticipate future oubreaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/18/coronavirus-mass-surveillance-could-be-here-to-stay-tracking
Writer: Oliver Holmes, Justin McCurry, and Michael Safi…
Content type: Examples
Lithuania’s data protection authority has suspended the country’s COVID-19 contact tracing app for failing to comply with GDPR’s principle of accountability at the Lithuanian health ministry, which is the relevant data controller. It investigated the app in response to media coverage and public opinion put forward by data protection lawyers and practitioners.
Source: https://globaldatareview.com/coronavirus/lithuanian-contact-tracing-app-suspended
Writer: Alex Pugh
Publication: Global Data…
Content type: Examples
Turkish authorities are investigating several senior doctors who lead “medical chambers” - professional bodies - in Van, Mardin, and Sanhurfa and have been accused since March 2020 of “issuing threats to create fear and panic among the public” in media interviews and social media posts relating to the COVID-19 outbreak in Turkey. They have also been banned from travelling and required to sign in with their local police stations. The doctors had suggested the authorities were hiding information…
Content type: Long Read
As more and more of us feel compelled to cover our faces with masks, companies that work on facial recognition are confronted with a new challenge: how to make their products relevant in an era where masks have gone from being seen as the attribute of those trying to hide to the accessory of good Samaritans trying to protect others.
Facewatch is one of those companies. In May 2020, they announced they had developed a new form of facial recognition technology that allows for the…
Content type: Video
The two-minute video splices together clips of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, cleverly editing his speeches so that he mouths sentences such as:
'Coronavirus won’t affect you if your immunity passport’s blue'
'You can tell our technology’s going well, we’re running this whole thing in Excel'
'A mutant algorithm trick, when it goes wrong, the blame won’t stick'
'Our system’s world-beating at self-defeating'
'So when results are not forthcoming, don’t ask me, ask Dominic…
Content type: Examples
noyb filed a complaint against address broker AZ Direct Österreich GmbH after it refused to provide information on the origin and recipients of data processed.
The address broker, in a response to a data subject access request, claimed not to know where the residential address of the data subject – which it had on file – had come from. Similarly, AZ Direct failed to provide a detailed reply regarding the recipients of the data, and simply provided possible categories of recipients.