Every move...
The surveillance genie is well and truly out of the bottle and hard at work as countries try to control the spread of the coronavirus. Singapore, Poland and Kenya have joined South Korea, Taiwan and Israel in deploying solutions that harness location data to enforce social distancing and track the movements of infected people. In the US, health officials are obtaining bulk location data to assess compliance with stay-at-home orders. The UK's data protection regulator has said it's legal to use anonymised mobile phone data, and Sky News reports that the government is preparing to launch a contact-tracing app which will alert people if they come into contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. For an idea of what the data can show, Google is producing reports on how communities are moving (or not moving) around. Activists are divided over the implications of these developments for privacy, and whether the genie will be returned to the bottle once this horror show is over.