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April 18, 2020 02:34 pm

Growth In Surveillance May Be Hard To Scale Back After Pandemic, Experts Say

Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo quotes the Guardian: The coronavirus pandemic has led to an unprecedented global surge in digital surveillance, researchers and privacy advocates around the world have said, with billions of people facing enhanced monitoring that may prove difficult to roll back. Governments in at least 25 countries are employing vast programmes for mobile data tracking, apps to record personal contact with others, CCTV networks equipped with facial recognition, permission schemes to go outside and drones to enforce social isolation regimes. The methods have been adopted by authoritarian states and democracies alike and have opened lucrative new markets for companies that extract, sell, and analyse private data. One of the world's foremost experts on mobile phone surveillance said the pandemic had created a '9/11 on steroids' that could lead to grave abuses of power. "Most of these measures don't have sunset clauses. They could establish what many people are describing as a new normal," Ron Deibert, who heads the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, said in an interview with the Guardian. The article provides examples from China, Russia, India, Europe, and the United States, and provides a link to an index of new coronavirus-related surveillance measures related to the coronavirus outbreak. The digital rights lead at the group behind the list says "This isn't just an issue with authoritarian governments. This is happening across the world."

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