Today’s Big Story
***Do you trust Facebook with that?***
Facebook and Google want to track Coronvirus cases. With test kits in short supply and new cases of Coronavirus continuing to appear at alarming rates, Americans are starting to turn to alternative solutions to stem the tide. In Wednesday’s newsletter, I discussed how more and more, Americans and Europeans look as if they are poised to begin welcoming in otherwise dubious surveillance technology in the name of public health. Now, Facebook and Google want to step in.
According to a new CNBC report, the US government is currently in talks with the two tech supergiants over potentially using user locaiton and movement data to identify and track Coronvirus cases. Officials argue that information gleaned from the data can help them identify new hotbeds of cases, and properly allocate resources and issue quarantines.
In total, there are reportedly 60 different tech companies working with the White House Office of Science and Technology in a task force to harness locaiton data. Uber, Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM, and researchers from Harvard are all believed to be involved.
Josh Mendelsohn is a managing partner at venture capital firm Hangar, one of the companies involved in the task force. Here’s how he described it in the CNBC article.
“The task force has a simple mission: to use the specialized expertise of the tech community provide recommendations to the White House and other public health officials that help lessen the impact of this disease. Working with experts across fields, we are finding ways to have an impact while keeping all of tech’s existing commitments to consumers.”
Call me alarmist, but I’m not exactly comfortable with Facebook, a company responsible for some of the most egregious data breaches in human history, to take the wheel on this one. While some people are echoing the concerns I voiced in the last newsletter over hastily welcoming in mass surveillance, others say the time has come to put privacy on the back burner.
“Focusing on only privacy while ignoring public health would be a mistake,” said Daniel Castro, the vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation told CNBC.
For what it’s worth, Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook doesn’t intend to share that data with the government. The Facebook founder elaborated on a call with reporters, a bit of which I saw on Casey Newton’s The Interface newsletter.
“We’re not aware of any active conversations or asks with the U.S. or other governments at this point asking for access to that data directly,” Zuckerberg said. “So I think some of those reports might have just been rehashing the disease prevention maps projects that we’ve been doing in the past.”
As I said in the last newsletter, we are living through an unprecedented time and some invasions of privacy may be necessary to save lives. But the recent developments here only add to my concerns that those steps are being taken out of sight, in the shadows, by a group of powerful tech companies who are taking it upon themselves where to draw the lines between public health and personal autonomy.
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In Other News…
***Yet Another Coronavirus Scam***
Scammers claiming to be from the Centers for Disease Control are stealing credit card information by pretending to offer virus tests. There is no vaccine currently available for the novel coronavirus and there likely won’t be for over a year.
Police departments in affected areas are issuing out warnings on social media to alert people of the schemes.
***UK coronavirus surveillance***
The UK government is analyzing mobile locaiton data from one of the nation’s largest mobile providers to track the coronavirus. Reporting from Sky News says the government is working with O2 to analyze supposedly anonymous cell phone data to see if people are following social distance guidelines.
The UK is effectively in lockdown at the moment due to the coronavirus. The moves, like other similar tracking initiatives being quickly ushered in across the group, has worried some Briitish privacy advocates like Jim Killock, the director of Open Rights Group.
"The government needs to maintain public trust, which means they must declare what they are doing, under which laws,” Killock told Sky News."Transparency is absolutely key to ensuring everyone trusts what the government is doing. As things stand, secretive discussions with private companies, combined with comments about sacrificing liberties, risks breeding mistrust.”
***Ring ring***
”Ring's work with police lacks solid evidence of reducing crime.” That’s the general consensus coming from more and more police departments that partnered with Amazon’s home surveillance doorbell.
For years, Ring has partnered with hundreds of police stations around the country promising that the video recorded on its smart doorbells would help reduce crime. That sounds great, especially for cash and resource-strapped law enforcement organizations. The problem is, those claims were never supported by proof.
Now a new investigation by CNET further dispels the Ring myth. Here’s Alfred Ng:
“But CNET obtained property-crime statistics from three of Ring's earliest police partners, examining the monthly theft rates from the 12 months before those partners signed up to work with the company, and the 12 months after the relationships began, and found minimal impact from the technology.
The data shows that crime continued to fluctuate, and analysts said that while many factors affect crime rates, such as demographics, median income and weather, Ring's technology likely wasn't one of them.”
CNET also spoke to actual police officers using Ring, none of which could attest to the smart doorbell actually reducing crime.
***Making it personal ***
The EFF has launched a new tool you can use to determine whether or not your face is already being used in a facial recognition database. The short answer … It probably is.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
***Israel halts surveillance … for now***
A high court in Israel said it will shut down the government’s use of mass surveillance to tack Coronevirus patients if the parliament fails to establish parliamentary oversight over it within five days. The surveillance apparatus, called the Shin Bet security service, was originally meant to track supposed terrorists but has been repurposed amidst the current pandemic to track coronavirus cases.
As mentioned in Wednesday’s newsletter, the surveillance apparatus, which was previously undisclosed, tracks Israelis through their cell phone geo-locations and can order people into quarantine.
***Shouty drones***
Police in Spain are using drones to yell at people breaking quarantine. You may have seen videos last month of drones being used in quarantined areas of China to scold people for not wearing masks to protect from the coronavirus. Well, those same shouty drones have made their way to Spain.
The entire country of Spain officially went into lockdown last Saturday but, like most places in Europe and the United States trying to enforce shutdowns, people won’t listen. As a result, drones mounted with microphones are shouting out orders. Here’s one of the commands being issued.
“Please, health authorities recommend back home and leaving parks.”
Long Reads/Food for Thought
Face Surveillance Is Not the Solution to the COVID-19 Crisis
By Matthew Guariglia, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
How China built facial recognition for people wearing masks
By Yuang Yang, Ars Technica
Facial Recognition Companies See the Coronavirus as a Business Opportunity
By Dave Gershgorn for OneZero
Alright, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading, and stay tuned for another issue this Friday.
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