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.
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
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 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)
8 europeans telecoms providers (Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange,Telefonica, Telecom Italia , Telenor, Telia and A1 Telekom Austria) have agreed to share mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus. The Commission said it would use anonymsed data
South Africa's Communications Minister, Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, has stated that telecommunications operators in the country have agreed to provide location data to identify how many people have been infected in a particular area. The Government has broad powers under a national state of disaster
The Mumbai police have been asked by the civic governing body to track the movements of people arriving at Mumbai airport through the GPS location of their phones. Arrivals at the airport in Mumbai are also being stamped with “Proud to protect Mumbaikars. Home quarantined” with the date until which
Bulgarian police forces have been authorised to request and obtain metadata from citizens' private communications from telephone and Internet operators. The powers are reportedly to be used to monitor those under compulsory quarantine, and will allow police to track their movement as well as
The Armenian National Assembly is considering identifying the contacts of people infected with Covid-19 through cell phone location data. The draft was tabled by the government. If approved, the operators of the public electronic communications networks will be obliged to provide information on
Although the alerts about contacts with people infected by the coronavirus sent out via SMS by the South Korean government do not include names, the information included about people who tested positive for coronavirus, and their past locations can be revealingly detailed in some cases. Those who
The European Commission urged Europe's telecoms giants, including Deutsche Telekom and Orange, to share their users' mobile data streams from across the region to help predict the spread of the coronavirus "for the common good". In a letter in response, Dutch Renew MEP Sophie In't Veld stressed that
Researchers at Germany's Robert Koch Institute and Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute are working on an app that uses Bluetooth connections between smartphones and is compliant with GDPR to anonymously save the distance and duration of contact between people on the smartphone to make it possible to
Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Informatics/KOMINFO official website) On Thursday, 26 March 2020, the Indonesian Minister of Communication and Informatics, Johnny G. Plate, issued the Ministerial Decree No. 159/2000 to facilitate the cooperation between the Government and telecommunication
The success of South Korea's efforts to combat the coronavirus without a national lockdown and without suspending civil rights depended in part on preparation put in place after the 2015 MERS epidemic and in part on the country's network of private testing labs, which enabled the country to quickly
A newly-enacted Slovakian law, inspired by similar laws in Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan, allows the country's Public Health Office to use location data from mobile phones to track people ordered to quarantine to ensure they are not breaking the rules. The angry public response on privacy
Estonia's Government Crisis Commission has instructed the state statistical office, Statistics Estonia, to use mobile geolocation data from companies such as Telia, Elisa, and Tele 2 in order to study people's movements to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Statistics Estonia hoped to launch the
A day after John Tory, the mayor of the City of Toronto, told thousands of attendees at an online event hosted by TechTO that the city was gathering cellphone location data from telecoms in order to identify areas where residents were still congregating despite the city's social distancing rules, he
