Educational

Only 16% of Australians had downloaded the country's COVIDSafe app by May 3, a week after its launch on April 26, even though most said they support the federal government's coronavirus contact tracing app. In an Ipsos poll, 80% of those who said they were unlikely to download the app cited privacy

The Australian journalist Chris Buckley, who reports for the New York Times, was forced to leave China on April 10 after 24 years of reporting on the country, bringing the number of journalists forced out of the country in the last year to 19. After travelling to Wuhan to report on the unfolding

The Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has approved 18 amendments to the country's emergency law that allow him and security agencies additional powers. Only five of the amendments are clearly related to public health. Along with closing schools and universities, quarantining people

A parliamentary panel granted Israel's Shin Bet security service an additional three weeks to use mobile phone data to track people infected with the coronavirus; prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had requested a six-week extension while his government drafts legislation to regulate the data use in

After a call from a vendor, India's state-owned Broadcast Engineering Consultants Limited (BECIL) put out an expression of interest for electronic bracelets and accompanying software for use to ensure that COVID-19 patients do not violate their quarantine orders. A hundred companies responded. BECIL

A security lapse exposed one of the core databases of the coronavirus self-test symptom checker app launched by India's largest cellphone network, Jio, shortly before the government lockdown began in late March. The database, which had no password protection and contained millions of logs and

Authorities in South Korea, which had been successful in containing the coronavirus early on due to its aggressive testing programme, began trying to trace more than 5,500 people who visited a group of bars between April 2 and May 6 because a single infected customer led to a new outbreak. More than

The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh created a COVID-19 dashboard that displayed the names of at least 5,400 quarantined people, their device IDs and names, their OS version, app version codes, current GPS coordinates, and office GPS coordinates. Shortly after the dashboard's existence was posted on

Shortly after launch, security researcher Baptiste Robert discovered that India's contact tracing app, Aarogya Setu ("Health Bridge"), allows users to spoof their GPS location, find out how many people reported themselves as infected within any 500-metre radius, and mount a triangulation attack to

The rush to incorporate greater safety from the coronavirus is bringing with it a new wave of workplace surveillance as companies install tracking software to determine who may have been exposed and which areas need deep cleaning if an employee gets infected; monitor social distancing; and use

Amazon has spent $10 million to buy 1,500 cameras to take the temperature of workers from the Chinese firm Zhejiang Dahua Technology Company even though the US previously blacklisted Dahua because it was alleged to have helped China detain and monitor the Uighurs and other Muslim minorities. The

In a technical analysis of the UK NHSx contact tracing app for iOS, security engineers find that Apple's Bluetooth design makes it harder to detect iPhones running the app in background mode, and the app is using "keepalive" notifications in order to keep the app able to make the necessary

Moscow's first attempts to introduce digital methods by which residents could obtain digital passes to move around the city failed as the website collapsed numerous times and the app required them to get a pass for every single move rather than only to drive a car, as the government has stated. City

The global pandemic that has been declared by COVID-19 is already affecting countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. Recognizing the seriousness of this health crisis and the legal possibility for governments to take exceptional measures to control the pandemic, it is essential to remember that

The state of Utah gave the AI company Banjo real time access to state traffic cameras, CCTV, and public safety cameras, 911 emergency systems, location data for state-owned vehicles, and other data that the company says it's combining with information collected from social media, satellites, and

Our partners from IPANDETEC in Panamá wrote about privacy and personal data in the context of the COVID-19 response, stating that throughout Central America, data protection laws and patient privacy lean towards respecting their privacy before the scientific interest of their cases. Link: https:/