• As coronavirus sweeps across the globe, governments are stepping up surveillance of their citizens.
• A new index from digital rights group Top10VPN documents which countries are introducing new measures to track people’s phones.
• Some countries are collecting anonymized data to study the movement of people more generally, while others are providing detailed information about individuals’ movements.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Governments across the world are galvanizing every surveillance tool at their disposal to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Countries have been quick to use the one tool almost all of us carry with us — our smartphones.

A live index of ramped up security measures by Top10VPN details the countries which have already brought in measures to track the phones of coronavirus patients, ranging from anonymized aggregated data to monitor the movement of people more generally, to the tracking of individual suspected patients and their contacts, known as “contact tracing.”

Samuel Woodhams, Top10VPN’s Digital Rights Lead who compiled the index, warned that the world could slide into permanently increased surveillance.

“Without adequate tracking, there is a danger that these new, often highly invasive, measures will become the norm around the world,” he told Business Insider. …continued .
[Source: Business Insider]