Educational

By the end of March 2021 Eurostar will roll out a facial verification system in which passengers will send a scan of their passport and a selfie so that when boarding they can prove their identity by walking through a camera-lined “biometric” corridor instead of presenting their documents. The

A detailed analysis of Pakistan’s app, which was developed by the Ministry of IT and Telecom and the National Information Technology Board and which offers dashboards for each province and state, self-assessment tools, and popup hygiene reminders, finds a number of security issues. Among them: the

The lives of residents in French and Scottish nursing homes have been put in danger by the homes’ use of Dahua and Hikvision fever scanning cameras. The homes are violating ISO standards for such cameras: they have been incorrectly installed in front of large windowed doors, the staff are not given

Data-driven companies like Experian, CACI, and Xantura are pitching their services to help UK local officials to identify people in need. Xantura and CIPFA, the accountancy body for the public sector, have teamed up to deploy a £15,000 tool that uses local authority data including the NHS’s

Thermal temperature scanners, software keystroke monitors, and wearable location trackers are proliferating in US workplaces, with the data they collect outside of any of the country's electronic privacy laws. Companies report that employers are being asked to form part of the front line of contact

After the data protection authority ruled that Norway’s Smittestopp app disproportionately intruded on users’ privacy by collecting location data without demonstrating it was strictly necessary and by failing to allow users to separately grant permission for contact tracing and for using the data

Even though the scientific jury is still out on whether and how long post-COVID-19 immunity will last, proof of having recovered from the illness is an asset in renting out an apartment on Airbnb, US companies are beginning to develop an immunity passport for hotels, and the Chilean government is

Brazilian supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume publishing complete COVID-19 statistics. The government had purged the health ministry website of historical pandemic-related data and said it would stop publishing the cumulative death toll and

Beginning in March 2020, Turkish authorities targeted doctors in senior positions in “medical chambers” professional bodies in Van, Mardin, and Sanhurfa for allegedly “issuing threats to create fear and panic among the public” in media interviews and social media postings in which they discussed the

Researchers are scraping social media posts for images of mask-covered faces to use to improve facial recognition algorithms. In April, researchers published to Github the COVID19 Mask Image Dataset, which contains more than 1,200 images taken from Instagram; in March, Wuhan researchers compiled the

In a planned study, NIST will apply synthetic masks to faces digitally in order to leverage its large datasets (18 million images of 8 million people) in order to test how well verification algorithms handle masks. The study will reopen on June 24, 2020. https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face

Many of the steps suggested in a draft programme for China-style mass surveillance in the US are being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the pandemic, perhaps due to the overlap of membership between the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the body

The UK government spent two months touting its contact tracing app as the prospective basis for returning to something close to normality. As the June 1 target date approached, however, the government increasingly downplayed its importance. In the meantime, Apple and Google’s API were adopted by

After the CEO of NHSx told the the UK parliament that data harvested by the NHSx contact tracing app would be retained for future research, the UK Ministry of Defence said it would turn the data over to its Jhub to sanitise the data and remove all personally identifying information before passing it

Seventeen of 93 UK prosecutions for breaches of emergency coronavirus laws in May were incorrect or for offences that did not exist. All but one of the 17 were stopped at the first court appearance. In total, nine prosecutions were brought under the Coronavirus Act; all were dismissed because there

The Israeli company Kando is monitoring coronavirus traces in the sewers of the city of Ashkelon via sensors, autosamplers, and controllers placed under manholes in an attempt to build an early warning system of clusters of COVID-19. The system was originally developed to spot industrial waste