April 22, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — A digital rights group is warning that governments worldwide are working with big tech firms to develop software that uses people’s smartphones as a tracking application for health authorities.
Samuel Woodhams, digital rights lead for the United Kingdom-based
Top10VPN, a site that reviews Virtual Private Network (VPN) applications worldwide, gave the warning in a recent Business Insider report.
Woodhams created a live index to track the various security measures put in place in the name of fighting the coronavirus. This list includes government and private-sector tracking methods.
According to the index, there are currently 23 countries using contact tracking applications, with “alternative digital tracking measures” being active in 22 countries.
The live index also shows that “physical surveillance technologies” are being used in ten countries, and that coronavirus related censorship has been “imposed by 12 governments.” Lastly [...]
What is ContactTracing? Contact tracing is the process of identification of persons who may have come into contact with an infected person ("contacts"). By tracing the contacts of infected individuals, testing them for infection, treating the infected and tracing their contacts in turn, public health aims to reduce
infections in the population. Diseases for which contact tracing is commonly performed for include tuberculosis, vaccine-preventable infections like measles, sexually transmitted infections (including HIV), blood-borne infections, some serious bacterial infections, and novel infections (e.g. SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2).
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What is a Smartphone? Smartphones are a class of mobile phones and of multi-purpose mobile computing devices. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, which facilitate wider software, internet (including web browsing over mobile broadband)
and multimedia functionality (including music, video, cameras, and gaming), alongside core phone functions such as voice calls and text messaging. Smartphones typically include various sensors that can be leveraged by their software, such as a magnetometer, proximity sensors, barometer, gyroscope and accelerometer, and support wireless communications protocols such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and satellite navigation.
What is Surveillance? Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted
information, such as Internet traffic. Surveillance is used by governments for intelligence gathering, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. Surveillance can be viewed as a violation of privacy, and as such is often opposed by civil liberties activists.
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