On March 14, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced plans to launch emergency regulations to enable the country’s internal security service, Shin Bet, to retrospectively track Covid-19 patients through their mobile phones in order to see who they interacted with in the days and weeks before they were tested and for those people to be […]
On March 19, the President of Argentina Alberto Fernandez announced a mandatory lockdown or quarantine for the entire country with people only having permission to leave their homes to shop for food and to get medicine. On April 14, the authorities in the City of Buenos Aires announced that anyone who uses public transport or […]
On April 2, the Indian government launched a Covid-19 contact-tracing app using Bluetooth and location data called Aarogya Setu which means “bridge to health” in Sanskrit. The government initially claimed the use of the app would be voluntary but, within two weeks, its download was made mandatory for Central Armed Police Forces personnel and employees […]
In late March, the Kremlin ordered for the closure of non-essential businesses and for Russia’s 147million citizens to stay at home in response to Covid-19, while on March 30, it closed its borders. On April 1, President Vladimr Putin signed legislation which would allow for breaches of the state’s quarantine rules to result in a […]
On March 13, the Kenyan government announced that it had reported its first Covid-19 case. Since then, a raft of measures have been put in place to curb the spread of the virus including employing enhanced surveillance mechanisms and technology to deal with the pandemic. One of the major developments has been increased aerial surveillance […]
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared a state of emergency on March 11 in response to Covid-19. In doing so, he launched an “anti-coronavirus defence law” which enabled him to rule by decree for an undefined length of time. Under the law, anyone who spreads “falsehoods” about Covid-19 or the measures taken against it, could […]
The British government was scheduled to launch its controversial centralised contact-tracing app across Britain in June, following a trial run of the app on the Isle of Wight but announced in late June that it would instead move to produce a decentralised app with Google and Apple in the autumn of 2020. The centralised app was […]
On April 21, as Indonesia responded to Covid-19, police in Jakarta announced a ban on all May Day rallies. The ban came ahead of planned protests against a bill on job creation which unions said would reduce labour rights and followed reports that police in Jakarta had launched an investigation into an anarcho-syndicalism group which […]
On April 3, a coalition of civil liberties groups involving the Human Rights Law Centre, Digital Rights Watch, Access Now and the Centre for Responsible Technologies wrote a joint letter to the Minister for Health Greg Hunt seeking clarification on the specific design, operation, intention and privacy and data protection safeguards of the country’s then […]
The Irish government’s plans to launch a voluntary Bluetooth-based Covid-19 contact-tracing app were first mooted in media reports in March. Within weeks, a group of data protection and legal experts, academics, computer scientists and representatives from civil societies, such as the Irish Council for Civil Liberties and Digital Rights Ireland, held a meeting to discuss the proposed app. As […]