The covid surveillance nightmare
Journalists gathered data on security measures implemented during the covid crisis and found:
5 countries and many private firms started using heat cameras. Heat cameras are almost completely ineffective at registering a fever, but hit peak sales this year on the false promise that they would.
23 countries started implementing drones to enforce lockdowns.
4 countries started using police robots.
2 countries started using facial recognition cameras to enforce quarantine.
29 countries started mass gathering cell phone data for crowd control
18 countries implemented quarantining apps that force people to share location data an even selfies of their face.
62 countries implemented contact tracing apps and medical self-check apps. Several of these apps shared a lot of data with the state or a company, some saw huge leaks of personal data to hackers.
7 countries started using wearable tracking devices such as wrist and ankle bands.
Wherever it reads ‘started’, read ‘started openly doing so’, some where doing it in secret before. Also consider that countries that were already openly using these measures before covid are not counted. Many of them expanded their use of these types of technology.
This does not yet include the many kinds of work-from-home surveillance implemented by employers and schools. Tracking your physical movements in your own home or tracking which websites you visit on your own laptop, this tech cuts deeply into the lives of workers and students.
Was it all worth it? absolutely not. Not a single country reported significant success from the new apps and fancy tech. In many cases the results were beyond disappointing. The journalists describe it as ‘surveillance theater’ and point out that, as often, the poor were once again surveilled far more intensely than the rich.
Most importantly: while covid-apps are likely to fall out of use after the pandemic, most surveillance measures have no end date. There are no plans to take down the cameras or take the drones and police robots away from law enforcement. As we have seen before with anti-terrorism: more surveillance and power for law enforcement is often introduced as ‘temporary’ and then never removed. So far, the pandemic is no exception to this pattern. Unless we take action, we’re likely to en up with a far more surveilled world than before the pandemic.
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