Search
Content type: Examples
Egyptian doctors are reporting that they are being threatened for speaking and posting publicly about working conditions as they struggle in a medical system overwhelmed by the coronavirus. At least seven members of the Egyptian Medical Syndicate, a quasi-governmental body that represents health care workers, are being detained for discussing COVID-19 on social media, which the government characterised as spreading false news; syndicate board member was arrested after criticising prime minister…
Content type: Examples
Human rights experts have accused the home secretary, Priti Patel, of ignoring legal guidance in an attempt to target child asylum seekers who cannot prove they are under 18.
A letter from the Home Office, seen by the Observer, reveals that the government is putting pressure on social workers to speed up the age assessment of unaccompanied minors, and offering to bankroll councils that face legal challenges as a result. The move comes as new evidence shows that hundreds of people were deported…
Content type: Examples
Around 8,800 children have been deported from the United States along the Mexican border thanks to a new pandemic-related measure that functionally stripped the rights of those seeking asylum.
Donald Trump’s administration has expelled nearly 160,000 people since the emergency order proclaimed by the CDC took effect in March including roughly 7,600 adults and children who came to the US in families. The emergency order temporarily suspends citizens, regardless of their country of origin, from…
Content type: Examples
The Australian government reported soon after releasing its CovidSafe contact tracing app that the app doesn’t work properly on iPhones because it doesn’t use Apple’s Exposure Notification framework and the Bluetooth functions deteriorate if the app isn’t kept running in the foreground. The government will update the app to use Apple’s framework. The app will store data on Amazon Web Services servers within Australia, although critics have expressed concern that the data could be handed over to…
Content type: Examples
Colombia will adopt the Apple-Google contact tracing platform after finding it necessary to remove the contact tracing functions from CoronApp, the official Colombian coronavirus information app because they didn’t work. CoronApp was downloaded by 4.3 million people, and includes features to report symptoms and locate cases on a map. The contact tracing features, which were supposed to be able to overcome the limitations of the iPhone’s Bluetooth implementation, were provided by the Portuguese…
Content type: Examples
Many of India’s informal workforce of 450 million people - 90% of the total workforce - were abruptly closed out of their places of employment when prime minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a lockdown in April. Left without pay, unable to stay in their living conditions, and with only limited train service available, many workers began walking back to their home states. Along the way, police are punishing them for failing to obey the quarantine and social distancing rules; others are dying…
Content type: Examples
After governments in many parts of the world began mandating wearing masks when out in public, researchers in China and the US published datasets of images of masked faces scraped from social media sites to use as training data for AI facial recognition models. Researchers from the startup Workaround, who published the COVID19 Mask image Dataset to Github in April 2020 claimed the images were not private because they were posted on Instagram and therefore permission from the posters was not…
Content type: Examples
As part of its pandemic-related emergency measures, in April the Scottish government extended the deadline for public bodies to respond to freedom of information requests to 40 days. A month later, it was forced to withdraw the changes after opposition parties on the Scottish parliament's COVID-19 committee voted them down. FoI deadlines will revert to 20 working days, as previously. MSPs also passed an amendment requiring the Scottish government to report to parliament every two months on its…
Content type: Examples
The outsourcing company Serco, which the UK government has contracted to perform contact tracing, accidentally shared the email addresses of almost 300 of the contact tracers it hired when a staff member sent an introductory email and used CC rather than blind CC. Serco does not intend to refer itself to the Information Commissioner's office.
Writer: Ross Hawkins
Publication: BBC
Content type: Examples
Soon after the UK began reopening pubs with the requirement that staff retain customer details in case they are needed later for contact tracing, a woman reported on Twitter that the next day the bartender messaged her on Facebook. The story was picked up by Refinery29 and the Independent, but taken down at her request. On Twitter, numerous women responded to highlight similar experiences.
https://twitter.com/roselyddon/status/1281885086347075588
https://twitter.com/katebevan/status/…
Content type: Examples
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, United Airlines has disclosed that it has agreed to transfer the ownership of its frequent flyer program and associated data to a subsidiary company and pledge the data as collateral to secure a $5 billion loan from a consortium of US banks. If the airline should default on the loan, the creditor banks will be able to seize the personal data and auction it to the highest bidder. Like all airlines, United has seen its business collapse…
Content type: Examples
The UK had unrealistic expectations for antibody testing; as early as April health secretary Matt Hancock was suggesting that antibody testing could form the basis for immunity passports even though it is still uncertain whether and for how long SARS-CoV-2 confers immunity to further infection. Prime minister Boris Johnson’s enthusiasm for antibody tests, which he called a “game-changer”, led the UK government to pay £16 million up front for tests from two Chinese companies, which proved in…
Content type: Examples
More than 6 million Australians downloaded the government’s COVIDSafe contact tracing app after being told it was necessary to help health officials track future coronavirus outbreaks. In late May, a software developer found a flaw in the app that would allow someone with a relatively simple Bluetooth device to crash the app running on nearby phones so they wouldn’t attempt to pair with other nearby phones and no data would be available to health officials if the phone’s owner becomes infected…
Content type: Examples
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court has struck down a government order forcing telecommunications companies to provide access to the user information relating to the country’s 200 million citizens to enable the government to conduct phone interviews to determine the economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the process, the ruling established that data protection is a fundamental right. However, privacy advocates warned that the lack of established data protection law in the country opened the…
Content type: Examples
In London, during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, young black men were stopped and searched by police 21,950 times with no further action taken in 80% of cases. If each individual were searched only once - which may not be the case - that would equate to 30% of all young black males in London. The Metropolitan police increased its use of stop and search during the lockdown, carrying out 43,000 stops in May 2020, more than double the number in May 2019. The Met responded that crime is also not…
Content type: Examples
Britain’s Cabinet Office awarded an £840,000 contract for researching public opinion about government policies, portions of which involved conducting focus groups related to Brexit rather than COVID-19, to Public First, a company owned by two long-term associates of Minister for the Cabinet Office Michael Gove and special advisor Dominic Cummings, without putting the work out to tender. The government used COVID-19 emergency regulations allowing services to be urgently commissioned to justify…
Content type: Examples
Governments in Norway, Britain, Qatar, and India, among others, have had to either drop or remediate the contact tracing apps they’ve released to help combat the coronavirus due to the rush in which they were released. Many had security flaws that risked exposing user data; others pose privacy and security risks due to the amount of data they collect. While the apps may be helpful in countries like South Korea, where the medical infrastructure exists to do mass testing and isolation, digital…
Content type: Examples
The Dutch data protection authority, Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, is recommending against a bill working its way through the parliament that would force telecoms operators to collect more data on their customers and share it with Statistics Netherlands as part of the country’s pandemic response. The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RVIM) has compared this data to a “smoke alarm” that could provide an early warning of new outbreaks. However, the AP complains that the…
Content type: Examples
More than 725,000 people downloaded Ireland’s COVID-19 tracker and contact tracing app, Covid Green, within 24 hours of its launch, according to the Health and Safety Executive. Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly stressed that the app, which was developed by the Waterford company Nearform, was not a “silver bullet” but would enhance other contact tracing measures and urged everyone to download it as it would help keep schools and offices open by reducing the time it takes to trace close…
Content type: Examples
All migrants arriving in the UK since June have been ordered to quarantine, but a Border Force source said that little is being done to ensure the rules are followed and some in emergency accommodation are being given vouchers to go to the shops.
Thousands of British tourists returning from France are now being forced to self-isolate for 14 days whilst those it is understood that some of those crossing the Channel on small boats migrants are still going shopping for food.
The Home Office…
Content type: Examples
The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement service announced in July that the State Department will not issue visas to students whose universities shift to online-only learning and they must leave the country or face deportation. More than 1 million higher education students in the US come from overseas, though enrollment has been declining since 2016, and the move is a blow to university budgets. Eight percent are planning to operate online-only, 60% are planning for in-person instruction, and…
Content type: Examples
The New Zealand MP Hamish Walker, a member of the centre-right opposition National party, admitted leaking the details of all the country’s 18 active COVID-19 cases to the media in order to “expose the government’s shortcoming”. Walker said he had been advised that his actions were not illegal. The government has announced an independent inquiry.
Publication: Guardian
Writer: Eleanor Ainge Roy
Content type: Examples
New US federal data released by the CDC in response to freedom of information requests show striking racial and ethnic disparities in all parts of the country in who gets infected and hospitalised with coronavirus. A survey of 640,000 infections in nearly 1,000 US counties found that Latino and African-American US residents are three times as likely to become infected and twice as likely to die of the virus as white people living the same places. In areas of Arizona and several other places,…
Content type: Examples
After ORG asked questions via its legal representative, AWO’s Ravi Naik, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care agreed to change the period it would retain Test and Trace data from 20 years to eight. Public Health England manager Yvonne Doyle explained that the novelty of COVID-19 was the reason for keeping the data longer, in case PHE needed to get back in touch with those who had tested positive with additional information.
Publication: ZDNet
Writer: Daphne Leprince-Ringuet…
Content type: Examples
In early July the Open Rights Group issued a pre-action legal letter to UK health secretary Matt Hancock and the Department of Health and Social Care saying they have breached requirements under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR by failing to conduct an impact assessment for the Test and Trace system. ORG and its lawyers, AWO, had been asking for details of the DPIA since the beginning of June, a few days after the system was launched. In their response, the DHSC’s lawyers said “there were…
Content type: Examples
The October 2019 Presidential Decree 98/2019 granted the Hellenic Police the option of using drones in policing and border management for broad purposes; previously they were limited to using them for purposes such as preventing forest fires or helping rescue people after a natural disaster or an accident. By spring 2020, the Hellenic Police had begun using their new powers in cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki to enforce compliance with lockdown measures instituted to curb the spread of…
Content type: Examples
Israel’s initial success in curbing the spread of the coronavirus in April was followed in June by a surge in cases that government advisers blamed on insufficient resources for ministries to implement an effective trace-and-trace programme and increase testing to the level that would show clearly where cases were appearing so outbreak could be suppressed quickly. Among the problems is the decision to use security service Shin Bet’s recently disclosed database of mobile phone location data to…
Content type: Examples
In a policy briefing, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics concludes that there is too much scientific uncertainty and too many ethical issues for to support immunity certification as a way of easing restrictions on travel, work, and other activities. While testing can be useful, the negative impacts of a certification system are likely to fall disproportionately on those who are already disadvantaged.
https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/news/new-briefing-covid-19-antibody-testing-and-immunity-…
Content type: Examples
Human Rights Watch finds problems with immunity passports
Human Rights Watch considers the first proposals for immunity passports and suggests that although antibody testing is useful for ensuring the safety of frontline workers or giving a good idea of the percentage of a population that remains vulnerable to infection, using them to issuing immunity passports poses numerous threats to equality. Among them: forcing people to get tested as a condition of employment, enabling new forms of…
Content type: Examples
Public-private partnership launches biometrics identity and vaccination record system in West Africa
In July 2020 a public-private partnership programme between the Bill Gates-backed GAVI vaccine alliance, Mastercard, and the AI identity authentication company Trust Stamp was ready to introduce a biometric identity platform in low-income remote communities in West Africa. The programme will integrate Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform into the GAVI-Mastercards “Wellness Pass”, a digital vaccination record and identity system powered by Mastercard’s AI and machine learning technology,…