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Content type: Examples
As employees shift to working from home, their employers are buying and installing software to monitor them in their new location. Companies such as InterGuard, Time Doctor, Teramind, VeriClock, innerActiv, ActivTrak, and Hubstaff provide a combination of screen monitoring and productivity metrics that managers can check to ensure staff are being productive. In some cases, employers ask staff to stay logged into a video call throughout the work day; others insist on constant status updates.…
Content type: Examples
As inmates are released from prison in order to mitigate the public health and humanitarian threat posed by the coronavirus poses to a confined population, Minneapolis-based Precision Kiosk Technologies is highlighting its AB Kiosks, which can be used to replace riskier face-to-face meetings with electronic check-ins for newly-released inmates and those on probation, who can use the kiosks to set schedules and trigger reminder texts and emails. The kiosks use fingerprint recognition to verify…
Content type: Examples
Led by Germany's Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute for Telecoms, technologists and scientists from at least eight countries, are working on a proximity-based contact tracing technology that complies with GDPR. The Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project (PEPP-PT) is intended to leverage smartphones to help disrupt the spread of infection by notifying individuals when their smartphones are near enough to to that of another person to carry out a Bluetooth handshake - thereby…
Content type: Examples
The consumer and market trends insight company StatSocial announced Crisis Insights, which it claims tracks rapidly changing consumer audience dynamics to help US brands and CMOs respond effectively to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and economic slowdown. StatSocial's Silhouette social data platform monitors and analyses more than 1.3 billion social accounts covering more than 70% of US households. Crisis Insights is intended to identify the changing dynamics of customers and consumers who…
Content type: Examples
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
The Argentinian Ministry of Transport, working with the state-owned satellite company ARSAT and the telecoms regulator,ENACOM, proposed to the Executive on 31 March 2020 a platform that uses cell tower data to track people on public transport and ensure they comply with quarantine laws. By 28 March, the Ministry of Security had detained 13,006 people for violating the rules. The government believes that although compliance is high, it will deteriorate if quarantine is extended much longer…
Content type: Examples
The San Francisco-based big data company Grandata has created a heat map to show which areas of Argentina are best complying with the quarantine lockdown. Grandata used an "anonymised" dataset collected from apps that provide third parties with geolocation information. The heat map shows if an individual has moved more than 100 meters from the place where they spend most of their time, apparently without taking into account the socio-economic contexts of different cities, where individuals…
Content type: Examples
On April 1, Iceland launched an app that uses GPS to locate people who may have been in close contact with confirmed COVID-19 patients. A message containing a download link for the app will be sent to all Icelanders; downloading it and then agreeing to disclose GPS data are both voluntary, but for it to work as intended 60% will need to opt in. The app will register all nearby phones, so that if an individual gets infected the authorities will have an accurate record of everyone who came into…
Content type: Examples
Learning from countries like South Korea, government of the Indian state Karnataka has assigned its ten-member COVID-19 task force, which includes IAS officers with expertise in the fields of technology, medicine and healthcare, to develop a system to the approximately 40,000 people who visited foreign countries during the period of the Covid-19 outbreak as well as those who have tested positive and their contacts. The Corona Watch app, which gives details of the places visited by the 56 people…
Content type: Examples
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), would track mobile phone users' location via GPS, cellphone tower data, and Bluetooth. Cy4Gateis ready to offer the system for free to Italian authorities, and pitched it publicly on Twitter in…
Content type: Examples
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, will host the system themselves, so the company would not have access to any data they upload. Individuals are given random identifiers; timestamps on their location data allow the authorities to…
Content type: News & Analysis
These are difficult and challenging times around the world.
In this global crisis, businesses are stepping in to support efforts by Governments and public health authorities to seek to control the impact of the virus.
This is important, as help of all kinds is sorely needed. However, we must also be wary that industry initatives and public-private partnerships are not used as an opportunity to profit from this crisis or to exploit data without legal safeguards.
Companies all over the world…
Content type: Examples
Mexico is one of the biggest buyers of next-generation surveillance technology. And now data leaked to Forbes indicates it's taken an unprecedented step in becoming the first-known buyer of surveillance technology that silently spies on calls, text messages and locations of any mobile phone user, via a long-vulnerable portion of global telecoms networks known as Signalling System No. 7 (SS7).
The revelation was contained in what an anonymous source close claimed was…
Content type: Examples
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: News & Analysis
Lockdowns and quarantines are an extraordinary measure that help in slowing down the global COVID-19 pandemic, and protecting the population.
However, they come at an even higher cost to some individuals, such as victims of domestic violence, persons in a vulnerable situation, and human rights defenders, who face specific threats that are exacerbated by measures taken by governments to address the global pandemic.
In that context, states should adopt special measures to keep those people…
Content type: Examples
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 and aggregated mobile phone location to coordinate the tracking of the virus spread. They also announced the data would be deleted after the crisis.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-…
Content type: News & Analysis
Amid calls from international organisations and civil society urging for measures to protect the migrant populations in Greece and elsewhere, last week, the European Commission submitted a draft proposal to amend the general budget 2020 in order to, among other measures, provide assistance to Greece in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Both at the Turkish-Greek border and in the camps on the Greek islands, there are severe concerns not only about the dire situation in which these people…
Content type: Press release
Efforts to contain the virus has led to a wave of surveillance initiatives unprecedented on its global scale. Now, a global coalition of civil society organisations is calling on such initiatives to respect human rights by adhering to eight recommendations.
Measures imposed so far range from the use of informants, police monitors, hand stamping, and public naming of individuals, to the high-tech use of tracking apps and mass surveillance tools. An analysis by PI has found telecommunications…
Content type: Examples
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
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 they have to remain in home isolation.
Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/coronavirus-mumbai-civic-body-turns-to-phone-gps-to-enforce-home-quarantine-rules-6321098/
Writer:…
Content type: Examples
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 "monitor who they talked to and which sites they visited". The Interior minister, Mladen Marinov, told a public television platform, Referendum, that the “new legislation only applies to…
Content type: Examples
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 customer location and phone calls to the authorities.
Source: https://en.armradio.am/2020/03/30/armenian-government-proposes-using-cell-phone-data-to-track-contacts-of-covid-19-patients…
Content type: Examples
After police officers in Paraguay posted videos of themselves punishing people who have been caught breaking quarantine on social media, Paraguayans expressed outrage over their actions. The punishments seen in the videos, which were recorded and shared by the officers themselves, include threatening people with a taser to force them to do star jumps or making them repeat "I won’t leave my house again, officer" while lying face down on the floor. The country's interior minister, Euclides…
Content type: Examples
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
After the British government announced a national lockdown, Derbyshire Police used drones to capture footage of people rambling, walking their dogs, and taking photos in the Peak District. The move was widely criticised as heavy-handed and counter-productive; however, the government followed up by saying that people should stay near their homes for exercise and not travel unnecessarily and granting police new powers to enforce the lockdown.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-…
Content type: Examples
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
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 that data must remain anonymised, and questioned the usefulness of aggregating very large quantities of location data from millions of Europeans who are locked down. Meanwhile, questions are being…
Content type: Examples
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 investigation for violating quarantine. The app will send reports to the the MPA investigation office and coordinated by the Attorney General's Office. Individuals will be required to sign a document…
Content type: Examples
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 population. The Office of the Chief of Staff had instructed the DNM to adopt this policy when it launched the app, also on March 23. Since launch, the number of unnecessary permissions the app requests…
Content type: Examples
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 digitally reconstruct infection chains. The idea is being copied from Singapore's TraceTogether app, which detects other users who have also installed the app. If someone tests positive, they can…