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Report Tracks How Governments Fighting COVID Are Increasing Surveillance

Adam Xu

   Governments around the world have used the COVID-19 pandemic as their
   reason for expanding digital surveillance and collecting more data from
   their citizens, according to a report published Wednesday.

   The annual [1]Freedom on the Net report, published by democracy and
   human rights research group Freedom House, found that state and
   nonstate actors cited COVID-19 to justify expanded surveillance and the
   deployment of new technologies that were once seen as too intrusive.

   Advocates warned that these new technology systems developed to conduct
   contact tracing and enforce quarantines could be abused and made
   permanent, particularly in authoritarian countries like China, which
   was ranked the world's worst abuser of internet freedom for the sixth
   consecutive year.

   "History has shown that technologies and laws adopted during a crisis
   tend to stick around," Adrian Shahbaz, Freedom House's director for
   technology and democracy and a coauthor of the report, said in a
   [2]statement. "As with 9/11, we will look back on COVID-19 as a moment
   when governments gained new, intrusive powers to control their
   populations."

References

   1. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2020/pandemics-digital-shadow
   2. https://freedomhouse.org/article/report-global-internet-freedom-declines-shadow-pandemic

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