Governments Could Track COVID-19 Lockdowns Through Social Media Posts | CNET

A research group scrapes more than 500,000 Instagram profiles in Italy to see if people abiding by the quarantine.

The Italian government enforcing its nationwide lockdown measures to control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

Your posts on social media have been harvested for advertising. They’ve been taken to build up a massive facial recognition database. Now, that same data could be used by companies and governments to help maintain quarantines during the coronavirus outbreak.

Ghost Data, a research group in Italy and the US, collected more than half a million Instagram posts in March, targeting regions in the country where residents were supposed to be on lockdown. It provided those images and videos to LogoGrab, an image recognition company that can automatically identify people and places. The company found at least 33,120 people violated Italy’s quarantine orders.

Read full story here: Governments Could Track COVID-19 Lockdowns Through Social Media Posts | CNET

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