25 March 2020
A round-up of new surveillance technologies being considered across Europe to deal with the pandemic.
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"Chinese-style surveillance is coming to a neighborhood near you.
From drones barking orders at park-goers to tracing people's movements through cellphones, Western governments are rushing to embrace sophisticated surveillance tools that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.
In the European Union, home to the world's strictest privacy regimen, leaders have taken the unprecedented step of asking telecoms companies to hand over mobile phone data so they can track population movements and try to stop the spread.
The European Commission has gone further, asking all such data to be centralized to speed up prevention across the bloc, three people involved in the talks told POLITICO. But epidemiologists argue that such efforts are only a first step: To be fully effective, some say, the EU will have to follow the example of South Korea and China and make infected people download an app that would reveal exactly where they go and whom they meet."
In fight against coronavirus, governments embrace surveillance (Politico, link)
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