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 Rio de Janeiro City Hall has signed an agreement with telecomunications company TIM to use geolocation data to develop "heat maps" by cross-referencing epidemological hubs with high population density locations. Under the agreement, TIM will pinpoint the movement of its users across Rio de
In response to a case brought by the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah), the Arab Joint List, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Israeli Supreme Court issued a temporary injunction on March 19 limiting the the state's and the Shin Bet security service's use of
Russian prime minister Mikhail Mishustin has ordered the country's Communications Ministry to develop a system, to be built on analysing specific individuals' geolocation data from telecommunications companies that can track people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive for
After Pakistani residents queried whether messages labelled "CoronaALERT" sent out via SMS were legitimate, telecom authorities confirmed that it was authentic, being sent to selected individuals at the request of the Ministry of Health under the Digital Parkistan programme. Individuals were chosen
The self-testing web app issued by Argentina's Secretariat of Public Innovation asks for national ID number, email and phone as mandatory fields in order to submit the test. The Android version requires numerous permissions: calendar, contacts, geolocation data (both network-based and GPS)
Because tracking and limiting the movement of those suspected to be carrying COVID-19 carriers has been a factor in flattening the exponential curve of cases in places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, Professor Marylouise McLaws, a technical advisor to the WHO's Infection Prevention and
According to information collected by Le Temps, telco Swisscom will use SIM card geolocation data to communicate to federal authorities when more than 20 phones are detected in an 100 square meters area. Gathering of more than 5 people are forbidden in Switzerland since March 21. Data collected by
The Belgian Minister of Public Health has approved a programme under which telephone companies Proximus and Telenet will transfer some of their their data to the private third-party company Dalberg Data Insights in order to help combat the coronavirus epidemic; Orange has also agreed "in principle"
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has authorised the country's internal security agency to use a previously secret tranche of mobile phone geolocation data, gathered to combat terrorism, to retrace the movements of individuals with confirmed cases of the coronavirus and identify people
The Ecuadorian government has authorised tracking mobile phones via GPS satellite to ensure that citizens do not break mandatory quarantine after six violators were identified. Source: https://www.ecuadortv.ec/noticias/covid-19/romo-vigilancia-epidemiologico-covid19-? Writer: Ecuador TV Publication
A phone-tracking system used by SAPOL for criminal investigations was used to better understand where a coronavirus-infected 60-year-old couple, who had travelled from Wuhan to visit relatives, roamed in Adelaide in order to identify people who might have been exposed, according to the South
Mobile network operator O2 is providing aggregated data to the UK government to analyse anonymous smartphone location data in order to show people are following the country's social distancing guidelines, particularly in London, which to date accounts for about 40% of the UK's confirmed cases and 30
BT, owner of UK mobile operator EE, is in talks with the government about using its phone location and usage data to monitor whether coronavirus limitation measures such as asking the public to stay at home are working. The information EE supplies would be delayed by 12 to 24 hours, and would
A document awaiting approval from the federal authorities outlines the measures Russia may need to adopt in the event of a widespread COVID-19 outbreak. In "emergency mode". The proposal's Plan A allows for cancelling all international sports, cultural, scientific, and social events in Moscow
Russian authorities are using surveillance cameras, facial recognition systems, and geolocation to enforce a two-week quarantine regime affecting 2,500 people. Chinese citizens are banned from entering Russia; Russians and citizens of other countries who arrive from China are required to go through
The German mobile operator Deutsche Telekom announced in a press conference on RKI Live that it had passed on, anonymised, its users' movement data to the Robert-Koch Institute to study the extent to which the population would follow the government's restrictions. RKI president Lothar Wieler said
