An app that requires you to send in selfies to the government every hour. Another that can tell you – and the authorities – everyone you ha...
An app that requires you to send in selfies to the government every hour. Another that can tell you – and the authorities – everyone you have come into contact with over the last month. State governments gathering huge amounts of data about people’s movements without court orders. Entire lists with addresses and phone numbers of quarantined individuals being made public.
As the globe grapples with an extremely contagious disease that has infected more than a million people and killed over 50,000 worldwide, the coronavirus crisis has led to lowered standards of privacy and a huge increase in invasive government surveillance.
Many of these initiatives are being seen as emergency measures, as desperate attempts by authorities to trace and isolate carriers of the virus to prevent it from infecting more people.
But with a vaccine not expected until mid-way through 2021 at the earliest, it is starting to become clear that the emergency might last far longer than we expect – and that an expansion of the surveillance state may just become the new normal.
“That is indeed the biggest concern,” said Vrinda Bhandari, a lawyer who has worked on privacy and surveillance in India. “Right now we are ready to give up our civil liberties...
