For over twenty years, PI has been pushing back against ambitious government surveillance initiatives to regularise the retention of telecommunications data, or the bulk collection and processing. We have also pushed to ensure that telcos and other data aggregators do not exploit the data they hold.
Despite its reputation for data protection and the existing of the EU Charter, the European Union has been a particularly problematic surveillance actor in this space. The EU Directive on communications data retention was made invalid in 2016 by the European Court of Justice (CJEU) and yet repeatedly governments and the EU have sought to re-establish the policy. Sweden and the UK are currently before the European Court of Human Rights on bulk surveillance powers and the sharing of data across borders, including telecommunications data.
Valuable data from mobile phone companies will for the most part be the location data they collect as a result of your phone connections to their cell towers. They also hold data on all the calls you make, so they can see who you are interacting with -- though less valuable for health purposes, this is what intelligence and police agencies often crave. Therefore they will be able to provide insights into location and contact-tracing.
The emphasis on this data is primarily for enforcement purposes. So when Swisscom notifies Swiss authorities of mass gatherings, Telco A1 to the Austrians, or O2 shares data with the UK Government, or in Belgium the telcos are giving data to a third-party analytics company -- they are doing so to aid the monitoring and enforcement of social distancing.
This isn't necessarily helping health researchers in the 'delay' phase; though there is confusing news from Russia believing that contact tracing can occur using this data, or reports that in Italy 'anonymised' location data can aid contact tracing -- either the data is anonymous or merely de-identified and re-identifiable when someone tests positive.
When we see this in the form of enforcement rather than direct healthcare, it's easier to understand why the Israeli government would therefore hand this data to its internal policing agency, Shin Bet.
In later stages, this data could be used for enforcement of self-quarantines, where any given individual's movements across cells could be notified to authorities.
As part of its new state of emergency law, Cambodia's national assembly has granted the country's leader, Hun Sen, new powers to surveille telecommunications, control the press and social media, restrict freedom of movement and of assembly, seize private property, and enforce quarantine orders, as
On request, Vodafone Australia, which has 6 million subscribers nationwide, handed the mobile phone location data of several million Australians to the federal and New South Wales governments to help them monitor whether people are following the social distancing restrictions. The governments
The government has issued a substantial rewrite of a controversial proposal to track people using their phones and other devices in the bid to contain Covid-19. AmaBhungane, an investigative journalism newsroom, said the first “directions” – issued last week by the minister of communications –
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
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
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
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
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
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
The Israeli defense minister, Naftali Bennett, has published a plan under which civilian companies including the controversial company NSO Group would cooperate with the defence establishment to fight the novel coronavirus after a sharp rise in reported cases indicated that existing methods of
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
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
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
