You Can't Donate Other People's Personal Data | The Cat Herder, Volume 3, Issue 10
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Surveillance as a (predictable) solution emerges, and spreads. After far too long it turns out the Public Services Card is not streamlining anything, nor is it necessary.
Stay safe and stay at home if you can. Wheaton’s Law applies, now more than ever.
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It’s replacing them now with traditional CCTV, said a council spokesperson. And “retrospectively” doing its mandatory data-protection analysis.
If you want to use CCTV, that’s fine. Do your DPIA first, and that will inform the decision whether or not to go ahead. Don’t add on facial recognition because in most cases you will be told to shut it down because you won’t be able to justify it.
Many more people than usual are working from home. Video and teleconferencing vendors are seeing greatly increased usage of their products and services. Some of these come with a side order of extremely intrusive tracking.
Access Now has published an open letter to Zoom calling on the video conferencing company to release a transparency report. The company has never published a transparency report that could shed light on how data and information it manages is protected or shared with governments.
All across the world governments are moving in the direction of deploying mass surveillance solutions with the aim of tracking the spread of Coronavirus.
In Germany Deutsche Telekom ‘donated’ data to the Robert Koch Institute for this purpose. A rather disingenuous characterisation since the data isn’t Deutsche Telekom’s to donate.
Why Deutsche Telekom’s data donation to fight the spread of COVID-19 sets a potentially troubling precedent.
The Israeli government appears to have gone even further.
The information, intended for use in counterterrorism, would help identify people who have crossed paths with known patients.
On Thursday during the debate on the Health (Preservation and Protection and other Emergency Measures in the Public Interest) Bill 2020 two TDs mentioned using phone location data to do contact tracing work.
Privacy International has a dedicated website tracking the spread of these initiatives.
Tech companies, governments, and international agencies have all announced measures to help contain the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Some of these measures impose severe restrictions on people’s freedoms, including to their privacy and other human rights. Unprecedented levels of surveillance, data exploitation, and misinformation are being tested across the world. Many of those measures are based on extraordinary powers, only to be used temporarily in emergencies. Others use exemptions in data protection laws to share data. Some may be effective and based on advice from epidemiologists, others will not be. But all of them must be temporary, necessary, and proportionate.
The stories feature many of the usual suspects. Palantir, Clearview AI and NSO Group to name just a few.
The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection suspended all SAFE registrations on Friday afternoon. Having come up with an admirably quick solution to mass layoffs across the country in the form of an emergency payment, the department was confronted with the rigidity of a system developed to try and ensure ensure that anyone who interacts with the department ends up with their facial biometrics stored in the department’s database.
Applicants for the emergency payment could apply by post or online. This was intended to reduce the number of people showing up in person at the department’s premises around the country.
Despite that, in order to apply online one needed a MyGovID account. To get a MyGovID account one required a Public Services Card. To get a Public Services Card one had to attend in person at the department’s premises. (Does this remind anyone of the brief period when in order to get a passport you had to have a Public Services Card, and in order to get a Public Services Card you had to have a passport? That should have been the moment this entire project was scrapped.)
Last night the department announced an online application process which appears to be free of the requirement to get a Public Services Card.
Which invites questions about necessity and proportionality, and all the years of insistence from high-ranking department officials and the minister that the Public Services Card was streamlining access to government services for individuals.
You can now apply online for the new #COVID19 Pandemic Unemployment Payment.
— Department of Social Protection (@welfare_ie) March 21, 2020
To apply, visit https://t.co/M2y3fHlEv2 and register using just your email address.
For information on other #Covid_19 income supports visit https://t.co/U0FZv8MtF0 pic.twitter.com/XmpiENiy8y
Amazon pushes Ring as a crime-fighting tool. Data from three of Ring’s earliest police partnerships doesn’t back up that claim.
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Google is turning COVID19 screening into another data collection opportunity...
— Rossoglou Kostas (@kostasrossoglou) March 18, 2020
"To qualify for screening, it requires users to have a Google account and agree to information being potentially shared with Google."https://t.co/FpBHo7Ef1C
Alphabet’s Verily on Sunday night launched a pilot of a COVID-19 screening and testing website in the San Francisco Bay Area, a day earlier than it said it would.
The EDPB published a formal statement “on the processing of personal data in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak”.
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Earlier in the week Andrea Jelinek, chair of the EDPB, issued a statement on the same topic.
- 🐦This Twitter thread from Ryan Calo. “Apps that purport to track people infected with COVID-19 are a terrible idea imo for several reasons.”
- 🐦 Pat Walshe, also in a thread on Twitter. “The mobile industry use of big data for social good/public interest is too opaque. Where is the transparency?”
- “Authors like Author Naomi Klein have long warned that disasters provide handy cover for major corporations or governments pushing controversial policies.” Karl Bode for Vice on how COVID-19 could provide cover for the expansion of surveillance programmes.
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Endnotes & Credits
- The elegant Latin bon mot “Futuendi Gratia” is courtesy of Effin’ Birds.
- As always, a huge thank you to Regina Doherty for giving the world the phrase “mandatory but not compulsory”.
- The image used in the header is by Krystian Tambur on Unsplash.
- Any quotes from the Oireachtas we use are sourced from KildareStreet.com. They’re good people providing a great service. If you can afford to then donate to keep the site running.
- Digital Rights Ireland have a storied history of successfully fighting for individuals’ data privacy rights. You should support them if you can.
Find us on the web at myprivacykit.com and on Twitter at @PrivacyKit. Of course we’re not on Facebook or LinkedIn.
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