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Content type: Examples
The State Disaster Management Authority of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, in collaboration with other government agencies, is developing tools to track the travel history of people who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus and those who are under quarantine at home. The COVID alerting tracking system alerts the authorities if any of the more than 25,000 people who have been placed under home quarantine moves more than 100 metres from their base location. The system tracks their…
Content type: Examples
The Indian medical AI start-up Qure.ai has released qScout, an AI-powered "virtual care platform". Intended to help governments, hospitals, and clinics, the qScout app is meant to identify high-risk individuals, assist with contact tracing, facilitate remote triage, read chest X-rays to identify possible infections, use geomapping to estimate population risk, and use real time data to allocate critical resources. The company claims the app is also capable of reading chest x-rays to detect…
Content type: Examples
The computer science department at IIT-Bombay has sent two proposals for mobile applications that can track quarantine violators to a variety of Indian public authorities including officials in the Ministry of Human Resource and Development, the Maharashtra state government, and the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. The first, Corentine, is intended to geofence suspects and asymptomatic carriers, and Safe, which was previously used by IIT-Bombay students to register classroom attendance,…
Content type: Examples
On the second day of India's nationwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the Karnataka government published the home addresses of quarantined residents, as a deterrent to breaking the rules. The list included individuals who had flown in from a foreign country and been asked to stay indoors for two weeks but who had not tested positive for the novel coronavirus. Although the government deleted a tweet announcing its intention, the list is still available on its website and is circulating…
Content type: News & Analysis
This week International Health Day was marked amidst a global pandemic which has impacted every region in the world. And it gives us a chance to reflect on how tech companies, governments, and international agencies are responding to Covid-19 through the use of data and tech.
All of them have been announcing measures to help contain or respond to the spread of the virus; but too many allow for unprecedented levels of data exploitation with unclear benefits, and raising so many red flags…
Content type: Video
This week: it's a weird one - rather than our normal look at technology, we've got recommendations for movies and games you might enjoy while you're locked down.
Music by Simon Mathewson, you can find more from him here: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Simon_Mathewson
Recommendations include:
Sorry to Bother You
Legally Blonde
S-Club Seeing Double
Snowpiercer
Broforce
Ultimate Chicken Horse
Hidden in plain site
Don't starve
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where…
Content type: Examples
On March 24 the German Bundestag passed a comprehensive amendment to the Infection Protection Act that authorises the Federal Ministry of Health to implement measures for medical care without the consent of the Federal Council. These include the ability to impose curfews and travel restrictions, override patent protection for medical products, and issue ordinances creating other exceptions to the law. The Federal Data Protection Commissioner criticised the proposals because he doubted whether…
Content type: Examples
The French telecom operator Orange is repurposing its 2013 Flux Vision, which allowed cities and tourist destinations to see their visitors' travel flows, to answer European Commissioner Thierry Breton's call for the EU's mobile operators to provide their location data to fight the pandemic through population monitoring. The French data protection regulator, CNIL, is suggesting that the data is anonymised and therefore legal to use. However, in order to provide the service Orange must first…
Content type: Examples
The Cyprus health minister, Constantinos Ioannou, has imposed a curfew between 9pm and 6am every night from 31 March onwards for all but essential workers, who will have to carry a confirmation form signed by their employer; those who do not comply will be fined €300, double the previous fine. Individuals may only leave their homes once a day and only after sending a text to 8998 (those over 65 may use a printed form). Police officers and neighourhood watch groups will carry out sample checks.…
Content type: Examples
The Croatian government intends to enforce individual quarantine orders via a dedicated app, text message alerts, or location data provided by telecommunications companies. However, the government aims to comply with GDPR by targeting only those ordered into self-isolation and only tracking their current location, not their movements (a sensitive issue from the days of the former Yugoslavia), and by only instituting these measures if it was otherwise impossible to protect citizens' health and…
Content type: Examples
The Western Australia state police force is using drones to deliver audio warnings to enforce the quarantine restrictions placed on some individuals and sending more than 200 officers to patrol the streets to break up gatherings and enforce social distancing in parks, beaches, and cafe strips. The state's premier, Mark McGowan, admitted the measures were extreme, but felt they were necessary to send the message to residents. Police have been granted greater powers to charge people if they…
Content type: Examples
The former Big Brother reality TV star Matías Schrank was arrested by the Cybercrime division of the Misiones provincial police, after publishing tweets that claimed that Eduardo Rovira, the president of the Misiones legislature, had contracted COVID-19 on his recent trip to Thailand and was reckless in not immediately going into quarantine but continuing to hold meetings with other high-level government officials. Schrank was charged under Article. 211 of the Criminal Code, which…
Content type: Examples
The Argentinian company Urbetrack is developing a "Cuidate en casa" (Take Care of Yourself at Home) app that it will pitch to government agencies throughout the country. The goal is to contribute to remediating the health crisis by helping enforce quarantine. The plan is that users will download the app and complete a form with their personal details as chosen by the local authority. The app will then generate a "radial geofence" defined by the local authority, within which the user must stay.…
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
Biometrics companies are offering free services to essential businesses, remote workforces, and government agencies administering benefits claims during the coronavirus pandemic. Among them are Redrock Biometrics, which is waiving its licence fee for palm print recognition for essential businesses; Daon, which is offering free access to its multi-factor biometrics-based authentication platform, "IdentityX", to all new customers; PrivyID is offering a month of free digital signature service to…
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 company that makes the Natural Cycles women’s fertility app has added n optional service to allow users to track Covid-19 symptoms as well as positive and negative tests. As part of its fertility service, the app already takes each user’s basal body temperature daily; enabling the additional functionality is intended to help understand the spread of the virus and its effects across the world.
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/coronavirus-…
Content type: Examples
Prime Minister Andrew Holness told the House of representatives that efforts to combat Covid-19 would be “greatly assisted” by a mandatory biometric national ID system. The national identification system, NIDS, would require everyone to register and be linked to an individual’s unique biometric. The system has been highly controversial, and was subject to a challenge last year brought by oppossiton leader Julian Robinson in Jamaica’s Supreme Court, which ruled it violated the right to privacy…
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
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
As part of its efforts to facilitate a transition out of lockdown, researchers at Germany's Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, are planning to introduce "immunity certificates" for those who pass an antibody test to show they have had and recovered from the virus and are ready to re-enter the workforce. The intention is to test 100,000 people at a time and use the information so gathered to plan the transition.
Sources:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/29/germany-will-issue-…
Content type: Examples
The Hungarian government passed a law on March 30 granting Prime Minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule indefinitely by decree, which he said was essential to deal with the coronavirus crisis. The law also contained a provision under which those spreading false information about the pandemic could be punished with up to five years in prison. The legislation, which critics describe as shutting down democracy, comes at a time when many are concerned about the country's health service after years…
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…