Can smartphones be enlisted in war against spread of Covid-19 without intrusive surveillance of what is on our devices?
A mobile phone displays a user's travels in New York. Google records your movements even when you explicitly tell it not to. File photo taken on August 8, 2018.
But can this be done without intrusive surveillance and access to our devices that store a wealth of private information?Firms can "anonymise" location data received from your smartphone by stripping out personal identifiers. It can then be presented in an "aggregate" form where individual and identifiable data points are not accessable.
In fact, mobile operators have already been providing such data to health researchers in both France and Germany. Singapore pioneered a method using Bluetooth. This is the technology that allows people to connect wireless headphones or earbuds to their smartphones. The TraceTogether app then matches up the codes with the telephone number of owners, and then messages them they had been in contact with someone who has been diagnosed with Covid-19.The other means to get practical information is to utilise the location data of phone users.
"However, states' efforts to contain the virus must not be used as a cover to usher in a new era of greatly expanded systems of invasive digital surveillance," said a statement issued on Thursday by 100 rights groups including Amnesty International, Privacy International and Human Rights Watch.
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