global hackathon<\/a> to find privacy-friendly technology solutions to fight Covid-19.<\/p>\nEuropeans are stuck at home because of coronavirus and pollution is dropping. Check out these before and after air-quality maps.<\/p>\n
France is piling on measures to help startups through coronavirus. The latest announcement is a massive cash injection.<\/p>\n
Mobile location tracking<\/h4>\n
The announcements are a reaction to the way European governments have been handling coronavirus, with increasing use of data-tracking technology to measure the spread of the pandemic.<\/p>\n
The decision of the UK\u2019s National Health Service to enlist a group of US technology providers, including data-analytics company Palantir, to figure out how to stop the spread of Covid-19 drew some raised eyebrows last week.<\/p>\n
Elsewhere in Europe, telecoms carriers \u2014 including the UK\u2019s Vodafone, Germany\u2019s Deutsche Telekom and France\u2019s Orange \u2014 said they\u2019d start sharing mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus.<\/p>\n
While the Commission said it would anonymise data and aggregate it to protect privacy, the European Data Protection Supervisor \u2014 the EU\u2019s privacy watchdog \u2014 warned that safeguards should be well in place, and that caution should be exercised so these exceptional measures don\u2019t become permanent.<\/p>\n
Others have questioned to what extent anonymised data is fully anonymous, and whether it can be traced back, albeit with some expert work.<\/p>\n
War trauma<\/h4>\n
Around the world, countries including Israel, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan were quick to implement technology using data from smartphones for the likes of contacts tracing and quarantine control. While seemingly effective, the measures raised concerns from privacy advocates.<\/p>\n
The spectre of state surveillance has hit a nerve in Europe, perhaps more than anywhere else. For decades, the region associated surveillance and putting people on file with WWII trauma. That led to a tradition of highly-active privacy watchdogs, a cautious take on exploiting Europeans\u2019 data and a tough stance from regulators on abuses by technology giants.<\/p>\n
It culminated with the adoption of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force in May 2018 after years of negotiation between member states.<\/p>\n
GDPR spirit<\/h4>\n
But now, all that is at risk of being thrown out the window.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis complicated construct is now facing its make or break challenge,\u201d says Andre Loesekrug-Pietri, the chairman of JEDI, the Joint European Disruption Initiative \u2014 Europe\u2019s version of the US Defence department\u2019s moonshot innovation unit DARPA. \u201cIt is not certain that the spirit of the GDPR survives the coronavirus crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Loesekrug-Pietri is one of the people warning that anonymised data is not foolproof. He says Europe should focus on fostering new homegrown technology to avoid the privacy trap while better exploiting people\u2019s data for things like coronavirus tracking.<\/p>\n
The PEPP-PT initiative vowed that the framework and technology it is developing would be entirely GDPR compliant. JEDI meanwhile has been supporting the research and development of technology like homomorphic cryptology, which would also be respectful of GDPR and Europe\u2019s privacy-first DNA, Loesekrug-Pietri says.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cEurope\u2019s ability to position itself on these technologies today defines our ability to protect our data tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
___
\nhttps:\/\/sifted.eu\/articles\/covid-1984\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More like Covid-1984<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12020\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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