Is coronavirus exposing your smartphone's privacy?

In many countries, officials are looking that how smartphones can be utilised in the war against pandemic COVID-19. Health officials are making use of smartphones to contact and approach the persons having a possibility of corona virus symptoms. This can be done by accessing our devices which stores a wealth of private data.

European commission has requested the information from the mobile operators, which can enable them to determine the location of users by measuring signal strength from more than one tower. Even the Google plans to publish the information about the movement of people and social distancing measures, so as to allow the government to have access over it.

Singapore and India is using a method of Bluetooth. In this, someone who has downloaded this app and kept their Bluetooth enabled will begin to register codes from all the nearby people who are having the same app on the phones. This app doesn’t track your location but it collect codes from the mobile phones. If any person declare himself as COVID-19 patient, then this tracker app matches the codes of nearby areas and messages them about COVID-19 patient.

Privacy International and Human Rights watched all this and warned that this increase in state digital surveillance powers such as obtaining access to mobile phone location and data, has threatens privacy of public. Not only this, it restricts the freedom of expression and freedom of association. In this way, it is been violating the rights and degrading the trust of public. They also added that, “we cannot allow the COVID-19 pandemic to serve as a excuse to gut individual’s right to privacy.”