The European Commission intends to request telecom data across Europe for use in the fight against corona, but experts warn of the consequences.

#Cybertracking , GPS data control and face recognition: in Europe too, governments use all digital surveillance tools to keep track of their citizens during the corona outbreak. The smartphone as a kind of digital anklet that checks whether people are staying at home.

European countries making use of this

Poland
In Poland, citizens in quarantine can download an app. She irregularly asks them to send a picture of herself in their surroundings within twenty minutes. Automatic face recognition determines whether it is indeed the person in quarantine. Participation in this digital quarantine check is voluntary, but it replaces a check visit by a police officer.

England
In the UK, researchers from the University of Oxford are working on a voluntary app that records the whereabouts of infected people. The aim is to call on people who have been near these people to quarantine.

Slovakia
The Slovak government goes one step further and is preparing a law allowing the government to use location data from telephones to check whether corona patients remain in isolation. These are people infected with the virus and people who have travelled to Slovakia from abroad.

Russia
Russia announced on Monday that it would like to warn citizens that they had been in contact with a corona patient using telecom data. In Moscow, 190,000 cameras hang in the city that are equipped with face recognition. Faces can be recognized by image. The company behind this camera system reports that it is the largest of its kind. With the system, for example, criminals can be tracked down.

Austria
The Austrian telecom provider A1 provided the government with anonymized customer location data. For example, it was examined whether citizens restrict their social contacts. For the same reason, provider Deutsche Telekom shared user data with the Robert-Koch Institute, which maintains disease and mortality rates in that country.

Belgium
In Belgium, Le Soir recently reported an agreement between the government and telecoms companies to share current location data with a data mining company. At the request of the Belgian police, Flitsmeister users will now automatically receive a voice warning. as soon as they approach the border. They have to reverse because the border is closed.

The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, such initiatives do not seem to exist yet. However, telecom companies KPN and Vodafone/Ziggo say they are willing to provide anonymised data for research if the government requests it. Vodafone/Ziggo says that he has not yet received a “formal request” from the government and does not want to say whether there has been any contact with public authorities about this. However, the Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) takes into account that location data will also be used in the Netherlands in the fight against Covid-19. “The AP believes that we should look carefully at what technical means we have at our disposal to stop the virus. When government agencies or other organisations submit a plan to us, we will inform you as soon as possible whether it is possible or not. We have created a special team for this this week,” said a spokesman.

Google Maps is — even in the Netherlands — quite accurate; according to Maps, stricter admission policy is now not busy in some supermarkets, but there are long waiting times to enter the store. Last weekend it was also seen that the Amsterdam parks were visited more crowded than usual.

Facebook has a wealth of location data, thanks to apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told in a press conference last week that his company had not yet been approached to provide more location data to the government. Meanwhile, this has changed: US media report that both Facebook and Google have been asked by the government to share more anonymized user data. It would be about recording general patterns of behaviour, such as the use of motorways or visiting supermarkets.
Read about surveillance of civilians during the corona outbreak in China also: Algorithms and drones should keep coronavirus in check

Flitsmeister is a Dutch app that keeps track of the mobility data of 1.7 million people. Every ten seconds, the app transmits the exact GPS data from the phone to a central database. On the basis of this anonymised data, delays and traffic flow can be measured. The effect of the call to work from home can be found in Flitsmeister's recent figures. In recent weeks, the number of kilometres driven in North Brabant fell as the fastest, because the call for home work in that province started a week earlier than in the rest of the Netherlands.