Educational

The UK's Home Office has granted police in England new powers to enforce lockdown rules for six months, to be reviewed every three weeks. The police can now: order people to disperse or leave an area; ensure parents are doing all they can to top their children from breaking the rules; issue a £60

The Northamptonshire Police reported a surge in calls from people reporting their neighbours for exercising more than once a day, holding barbecues in their back yards, or failing to cough into a tissue. Nick Adderley said his officers will issue penalty notices if necessary, but thought it

The Uganda Communications Commission announced on March 22 that it would crack down on people spreading fake videos and misinformation about the novel coronavirus through social media, noting that this behaviour is illegal under the Computer Misuse Act, the Data Protection and Privacy Act, and other

Israel intends to deploy a cellphone tracking system developed in Taiwan by Chunghwa Telecom, which launched it on February 1 in Taiwan, where it was used to track the subscribers of Taiwan's five network operators. To begin, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control compiled a list of people who need to

Spanish police are using drones to warn people to stay indoors apart from necessary trips after seeing a spike in COVID-19 cases. Human officers control the drones and relay via radio warnings to people to leave public parks and return home. Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/spanish-police

On March 9, SK Telecom began providing South Korea's Gyeongbuk Provincial Police Agency with its Geovision population analysis service and GIRAF platform. The company claims that the combination can analyse mobile geolocation data across the country in real time, create visualisations, and show how

The South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research will partner with Telkom and Samsung to create a track and trace system specifically for the South African context, which includes high levels of economic inequality, poverty, and

With more than 71,000 Serbian citizens returning to the country, primarily from Germany, Austria, Italy, and France, the government has introduced systems to ensure they obey the country's self-isolation rules. The government monitors telephone numbers, especially Italian ones, and pays special

An official directive from the Pakistani provincial government of Sindh titled "COVID-19 Mobile Registration System for Needy People" describes its use of multiple databases to identify those in need of welfare funds and disburse cash to them by combining taxpayers' data from the Federal Board of

Mobile phone users in Pakistan have discovered that the government is accessing, without consent, their mobile phone location and call records despite legal questions about whether doing so violates the country's constitution. After users reported that patients testing positive for COVID-19 returned

Norway's state research and development company, Simula Research Laboratory, in collaboration with the Institute of Public Health, is working to develop technical solutions to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Code discovered on Github and later removed included examples of how the researchers

New Zealand's lockdown protocol includes a system to allow the police to monitor the whereabouts of travellers returning home. On arrival at the border, incoming travellers are asked for a contact mobile number. Once Welfare has ensured they have suitable accommodation, they receive a text from NZ

The Ministry of Internal Affairs in Transnistria (the Pridnestrovian Moldovian Republic), an autonomous territorial unit of Moldova, has announced it will use facial recognition to identify people who break quarantine. In its press release, MIAT highlighted the case of a 26-year old citizen who was

Authorities in the Kazakhstan cities of Astana and Almaty will require those ordered to mandatory quarantine to install the Smart Astana app and enable geolocation settings, wifi, and Bluetooth to make it possible to monitor them and ensure they move no more than 30 meters from their designated

The Jamaican Government intends to fast-track creating and implementing a national ID system and give every Jamaican citizen a unique identifier in order to help it distribute aid and benefits needed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The government intends the system to be similar to others such

Using mobile phone data to verify the movements of their owners, the Italian region of Lombardy found that between February 20, when the first COVID-19 case was discovered, and March 10, movement by its 2 million inhabitants dropped by just under 60%. Lombardy has also used cell phone data, obtained