Search
Content type: Examples
Hours before OpenDemocracy filed suit to compel the UK government to release all the contracts governing its deals with a list of technology firms including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Palantir, and Faculty, the UK government released the contracts. Faculty is being paid more than £1 million to provide AI services for the NHS, and the companies involved in the NHS data store project, including Faculty and Palantir, were originally granted intellectual property rights and were allowed to train…
Content type: Examples
Kenya’s Independent Policing Oversight Body reports that it received 87 complaints covering 31 incidents in which injuries were linked to the actions of police officers and 15 deaths between curfew’s imposition on March 27 and June 5. In April, Human Rights Watch accused the police of brutality in imposing the curfew from the beginning, including whipping, kicking, and teargassing people.
Publication: Guardian
Publication date: 2020-06-05
Content type: Examples
UK police reported to be planning separate contact tracing system
Police forces in the UK are planning their own contact tracing system because they are concerned that giving details to the national contact tracing system would compromise undercover operations and working methods. Options under discussion include having police forces take over all contact tracing for police officers and staff or seconding staff from the NHS test and trace system to police forces. Health officials, however, say…
Content type: Examples
In the three months from March to May 2020 the UK government awarded at least £1.7 billion in contracts to private companies, most of them without a competitive tender process under emergency procurement measures put in place in March. A quarter of the 400 contracts that government departments have published have gone to companies that have not previously carried out government work, and at least seven were worth more than £100 million. The largest that has been published was a £234 million…
Content type: Examples
The app-based track-and-trace system that was supposed to be in place in the UK by June 1 will not be working at full speed until September or October, and the chief executive of Serco, one of the main companies contracted to deliver it, doubted the system would evolve smoothly. Scientists have said that lockdown should not be eased until the track-and-trace system is well-established. Serco is responsible for recruiting 10,000 of the 25,000 contact tracers, and is being paid an initial fee of…
Content type: Examples
Gypsy and Traveller communities in England, especially those living on canals and waterways or in unauthorised roadside encampments, have had no access to sanitation, refuse collection, or water for drinking, cooking, showering, and washing clothes during the coronavirus lockdown. Some local authorities have directed Travellers to public toilets without hand-washing facilities, while others tried to evict them. In addition, conditions like COPD and asthma are more common in Gypsy and Traveller…
Content type: Examples
Within days of the announcement that the UK's new Joint Biosecurity Centre would be run by Tom Hurd, the Home Office's head of counter-terrorism, the government announced that instead it would be moved to the Department of Health and led by Clara Swinson, a senior health official responsible for global and public health. The JBC was intended to assess the pandemic threat on a colour-coded scale similar to that used for terrorism, but public health experts objected that the virus does not behave…
Content type: Examples
Zoom said it would deliver end-to-end encryption as one of a number of security enhancements to its service, but it will only be available to enterprise and business customers whose identity they can verify and not on the free service. The company says it wants to be able to work with law enforcement in case people use Zoom for a "bad purpose". None of Zoom's competitors offer end-to-end encryption.
Source: CNBC
Writer: Jordan Novet
Content type: Examples
Black, Asian, and minority ethnic people in England are 54% more likely than white people to be fined for violations of the coronavirus rules, according to an analysis of data published by the National Police Chiefs' Council showing the racial breakdown of the 13,445 fixed-penalty notices recorded between March 27 and May 11. BAME people were fined at a rate of 26 per 100,000, compared to white people at 16.8 per 100,000; the comparison raised questions as to whether the fines were fairly…
Content type: Examples
An Israeli government panel tasked with managing the coronavirus crisis green-lighted a bill that would write into law the government’s authority to impose emergency regulations and froze a bill that would allow the Shin Bet security agency to track confirmed and suspected coronavirus patients. The latter move may end the Israeli government’s use of the secret service’s capabilities for combatting the pandemic. Shin Bet’s head, Nadav Argaman, reportedly told ministers that his defence agency…
Content type: Examples
At the end of March, jointly organised by the Robert Koch Institute (Germany’s public health body), the German Centre for Infection Research, the Institute for Virology at Berlin’s Charite hospital, and blood donation services, researchers planned to begin conducting blood tests among the general public in order to determine how many people test positive for antibodies to the coronavirus. Gerard Krause, head of epidemiology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research, and Brauinschweig,…
Content type: Examples
By the end of March 2021 Eurostar will roll out a facial verification system in which passengers will send a scan of their passport and a selfie so that when boarding they can prove their identity by walking through a camera-lined “biometric” corridor instead of presenting their documents. The Department for Transport is funding the system as part of a £9.4 million competition to revolutionise rail travel and is being developed by the British company iProov in partnership with Eurostar and the…
Content type: Examples
The lives of residents in French and Scottish nursing homes have been put in danger by the homes’ use of Dahua and Hikvision fever scanning cameras. The homes are violating ISO standards for such cameras: they have been incorrectly installed in front of large windowed doors, the staff are not given sufficient time to acclimate after coming in from outdoors, and the cameras deliver incorrect readings when the forehead is obscured by hair or a hat.
https://ipvm.com/reports/hikua-nursing
Writer:…
Content type: Examples
A detailed analysis of Pakistan’s app, which was developed by the Ministry of IT and Telecom and the National Information Technology Board and which offers dashboards for each province and state, self-assessment tools, and popup hygiene reminders, finds a number of security issues. Among them: the app uses hard-coded credentials, which it sends insecurely, to communicate with the government server, and it downloads the exact coordinates of infected people in order to provide a map of their…
Content type: Examples
Data-driven companies like Experian, CACI, and Xantura are pitching their services to help UK local officials to identify people in need. Xantura and CIPFA, the accountancy body for the public sector, have teamed up to deploy a £15,000 tool that uses local authority data including the NHS’s “shielded” list of individuals at extra risk from COVID-19 and other risk factors and demographic data to predict future needs for financial support and social care and assign risk for not only an individual…
Content type: Examples
Thermal temperature scanners, software keystroke monitors, and wearable location trackers are proliferating in US workplaces, with the data they collect outside of any of the country's electronic privacy laws. Companies report that employers are being asked to form part of the front line of contact tracing for COVID-19 and share data on a wholly new level. Even before the pandemic, employers sought to keep employee data exempt from the CCPA; privacy activists eventually won a one-year…
Content type: Examples
After the data protection authority ruled that Norway’s Smittestopp app disproportionately intruded on users’ privacy by collecting location data without demonstrating it was strictly necessary and by failing to allow users to separately grant permission for contact tracing and for using the data for future research, the country’s health authorities were forced to delete all the user data it had gathered since the app’s mid-April launch and suspend further use. Experts who were asked to review…
Content type: Examples
Brazilian supreme court judge Alexandre de Moraes ordered Jair Bolsonaro’s administration to resume publishing complete COVID-19 statistics. The government had purged the health ministry website of historical pandemic-related data and said it would stop publishing the cumulative death toll and number of infections in order to “refine” the official data. Independent media estimated the tally at 37,312 deaths and 710,8987 infections; Bolsonaro accused the media of creating a panic.
https://www.…
Content type: Examples
Even though the scientific jury is still out on whether and how long post-COVID-19 immunity will last, proof of having recovered from the illness is an asset in renting out an apartment on Airbnb, US companies are beginning to develop an immunity passport for hotels, and the Chilean government is issuing “release certificates” to people who complete quarantine after testing positive. In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, doctors are reporting that they’re seeing people test positive after attending…
Content type: Examples
Beginning in March 2020, Turkish authorities targeted doctors in senior positions in “medical chambers” professional bodies in Van, Mardin, and Sanhurfa for allegedly “issuing threats to create fear and panic among the public” in media interviews and social media postings in which they discussed the coronavirus. On May 4, a court in Sanhurfa imposed a travel ban on two of these doctors, and required them to sign in with their local police stations while they were criminally investigated.
https…
Content type: Examples
Researchers are scraping social media posts for images of mask-covered faces to use to improve facial recognition algorithms. In April, researchers published to Github the COVID19 Mask Image Dataset, which contains more than 1,200 images taken from Instagram; in March, Wuhan researchers compiled the Real World Masked Face Dataset, a database of more than 5,000 photos of 525 people they found online. The researchers have justified the appropriation by saying images posted to Instagram are public…
Content type: Examples
In a planned study, NIST will apply synthetic masks to faces digitally in order to leverage its large datasets (18 million images of 8 million people) in order to test how well verification algorithms handle masks. The study will reopen on June 24, 2020.
https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/face-recognition-vendor-test-frvt-ongoing
Writer: NIST
Publication: NIST
Content type: Examples
Many of the steps suggested in a draft programme for China-style mass surveillance in the US are being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response to the pandemic, perhaps due to the overlap of membership between the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the body that drafted the programme, and the advisory task forces charged with guiding the government’s plans to reopen the economy. The draft, obtained by EPIC in a FOIA request, is aimed at ensuring that…
Content type: Examples
The UK government spent two months touting its contact tracing app as the prospective basis for returning to something close to normality. As the June 1 target date approached, however, the government increasingly downplayed its importance. In the meantime, Apple and Google’s API were adopted by several others countries that had intended, like the UK, to build their own, and a trial on the Isle of Wight failed to produce the download numbers or success rate the commissioning agency, NHSx, had…
Content type: Examples
Seventeen of 93 UK prosecutions for breaches of emergency coronavirus laws in May were incorrect or for offences that did not exist. All but one of the 17 were stopped at the first court appearance. In total, nine prosecutions were brought under the Coronavirus Act; all were dismissed because there was no evidence the people concerned were potentially infectious, which is what the act covers. Of the 84 brought under the health protection regulations, four were withdrawn because they related to…
Content type: Examples
After the CEO of NHSx told the the UK parliament that data harvested by the NHSx contact tracing app would be retained for future research, the UK Ministry of Defence said it would turn the data over to its Jhub to sanitise the data and remove all personally identifying information before passing it on to NHSx. The app was due for improvements to its security after the code was released on Github and the app was trialled on the Isle of Wight.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/20/…
Content type: Examples
The Israeli company Kando is monitoring coronavirus traces in the sewers of the city of Ashkelon via sensors, autosamplers, and controllers placed under manholes in an attempt to build an early warning system of clusters of COVID-19. The system was originally developed to spot industrial waste within the municipal sewage system. In a month-long pilot with scientists and mathematicians in Israel, Europe, and the US, Kando found that its findings matched the health ministry’s data showing the…
Content type: Examples
On June 15 by presidential decree Chile extended its state of catastrophe, in place since mid-March, by 90 days and the pace of new infections continued to increase and the authorities declared a full lockdown in Santiago, where quarantine is routinely enforced by soldiers. The government intends to seek jail time for the worst quarantine violations.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-chile-idUSKBN23M2NH
Writer: Reuters
Publication: Reuters
Content type: Examples
The officials managing Florida’s 100-plus coronavirus test sites have asked the 1.3 million people tested so far for for names, social security numbers, dates of birth, and insurance information. Nearly 1,000 private labs process these tests, and dozens of contractor organisations collect swabs and deliver test results, some of them with no previous health care experience. There is little consistency about what information individuals are asked to provide, and there is no set vetting process…
Content type: Examples
US state and local authorities are using data from a host of location tracking companies, some of them little-known, such as X-Mode Social, Foursquare Labs, Cuebiq, Unacast, Phunware, and SafeGraph, to help them decide how and when to reopen. Many of these companies are part of the adtech industry and collect location data from unrelated apps to which users have given permission to access their location. Apple’s and Google’s refusal to allow contact tracing apps using their system to access…