In many countries, the fight against the spread of coronavirus requires the most drastic measures from the authorities, and the dissatisfaction of defenders of individual freedom is becoming less and less common. On the contrary, the experience of China shows that only total monitoring of the movement of citizens is one of the keys to success in this fight.
As noted by , European authorities by mid-April want to develop a set of rules for the use of mobile applications to track the movement of residents of those countries in the region that have suffered the most from the coronavirus outbreak. At the national level, applications for monitoring the movement of citizens using mobile devices are beginning to be implemented in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Austria and Poland. The latter country is tracking the behavior of citizens in quarantine, forcing them to regularly post photos of themselves in their home interiors, combined with automatically transmitted information about their geographic location. This practice is unlikely to comply with the pan-European policy on the protection of personal data.
The main task of the European Commission is to offer residents of the region a single application that would help effectively control the movement of citizens, but would not compromise their personal information. The data collected should be sent to government bodies authorized to monitor the movements of citizens - for example, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The authorities intend to block the use of those applications that violate European laws in the field of personal data protection.
Another goal of the initiative is to offer a Europe-wide toolkit for analyzing the resulting data. Based on the collected statistics, the authorities will be able to assess the effectiveness of certain measures, as well as propose new ones. A unified methodology will make it possible to better calculate existing risks. The position of legislators is that even in difficult times one should not neglect the principles of protecting personal information.
Source: 3dnews.ru