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by Afshin Yaghtin | Apr 3, 2020 | Current Events, Police State, Technocracy | 0 comments
Health departments in the U.S. are now using your cell phone’s GPS tracking system to monitor whether you are complying with COVID-19 “stay at home” quarantine orders. So if you’re going to defy orders, you might want to ditch your phone! Governments around the world are using cell phone location data to track where you are, when you went there, and how long you stayed in a given location. “The data forms a map of population tracking to report on density and social distancing as well as anonymized travel patterns. Some governments are a level beyond, exploring movement tracking, contact tracing, quarantine enforcement.”
While you would think this is happening in place like China, Singapore, and South Korea, the breach of privacy by world governments is expanding to both Europe and the U.S. “If you have a smartphone, you’re probably contributing to a massive coronavirus surveillance system,” the Washington Post reported on March 28, 2020 in article, entitled, “Smartphone data reveals which Americans are Social Distancing (and not)”. In the seemingly innocuous state of Kansas, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment is also using cell phone GPS tracking to monitor coronavirus compliance.
According to Forbes, “anonymized location pings to give the authorities a sense of where are large numbers of phones and so large numbers of people.” But “anonymized location pings” are only the start. Authorities can then “track the location and movements of [individual] devices, but anonymized into broad patterns. General inferences can be drawn around changes in commuting behaviour, how far people stray from home, whether the same groups are seen together, and so on.” Not so “anonymized” anymore. At the next level of surveillance, government agencies can “associate a phone with a user … without going beyond simple location data” and then begin “a simple contact tracing timeline”. “The most pervasive level”, however, according to Forbes’ Covid-19 Phone Location Tracking analysis, “is tailored to the individual. This might be quarantine or curfew enforcement, it might be linking a phone to its metadata—I know where you were and I also know who you call and text, therefore I can infer who you met and when.”
From a technical standpoint, systems are already in place normally to make tracking easily accessible. Trackers on cell phones already make this possible and already store and report your movements. All that government agencies have to do is tap into the onboard software technologies which can accept GPS systems. While this is normal life in Communist China, “The rubicon has been crossed in the U.S. and Europe now for the use of smartphone location data to track the virus.” All they needed as a virus and a crises to make this all not only possible, but welcomed by the majority of Americans.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), The U.S. federal government is also seeking large amounts of data from Google and Facebook, among other big tech companies and apps (after allegedly removing personal identifiers) in order to predict the next virus hotspots. Facebook previously made such data available to the U.S. government to track population movements during various natural disasters in the past. So while not entirely new, tracking is becoming more prevalent, and being used in new ways during health pandemics, such as with COVID-19.
Remember Edward Snowden? The man who exposed the vast breadth of spying at the NSA against American citizens without their consent or knowledge? Snowden said in an interview at the Copenhagen Documentary Film Festival on March 22, 2020, that (according to Business Insider), “increased surveillance amid the coronavirus outbreak could lead to long-lasting erosion of civil liberties … Countries have been rapidly ramping up their surveillance of citizens to study and curb the spread of the virus, ranging from mapping anonymized phone location data to highly invasive powers, like allowing the security services to track people’s phones without a warrant.”
“Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data’s still available to them — they start looking for new things,” Snowden said. “They already know what you’re looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?” GPS tracking along with the deployment of drones for covid-19 compliance is going to become the new norm.
Remember, your government is here to keep you “safe”, even if that means tracking your every movement and keeping you quarantined at home for as long as they deem it necessary.
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1. World Police Use Drones to Enforce "Social Distancing" | Saved Magazine - […] technology, along with GPS Tracking Using Your Cell Phone for COVID-19 compliance, may soon be “the new normal”, even…
Cell Phone GPS Tracking COVID-19 "Stay at Home" Orders in the U.S.
U.S. Health departments in some States are now using your cell phone's GPS tracking system to monitor whether you are complying with COVID-19 "stay at home" quarantine orders. So if you're going to defy orders, you might want to ditch your phone! Governments around the world are using cell phone loc
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