ACLU Outlines Privacy Concerns For Contact Tracing Tech | Engadget

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As Google and Apple prepare to team up on surveillance tech to help track the spread of Covid-19, privacy watchdogs at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) are urging the government and tech companies to take a tougher stance on privacy. The ACLU published a lengthy white paper outlining privacy concerns they say need to be taken into account in order for contact tracing tech to be effective. Apple and Google’s proposal would use bluetooth data to detect phone owners’ potential exposure to people who have tested positive for Covid-19.…

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Apple And Google Are Building Coronavirus Tracking Tech Into iOS And Android | CNET

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The two companies are working together, representing most of the phones used around the world. Two of the tech industry’s biggest players are working together to fight the coronavirus, announcing a new set of tools that could come to a majority of smartphones around the world. The new technology, outlined in white papers published by Apple and Google Friday, relies on Bluetooth wireless radio technology to help phones communicate with one another, ultimately warning people about people they’d come in contact with who are infected with the coronavirus. Apple and Google plan to…

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Facebook Begins Sharing More Location Data With COVID-19 Researchers And Asks Users To Self-Report Symptoms | The Verge

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The company’s Data for Good program is expanding. Facebook is expanding a program that grants researchers access to data about movement patterns in an effort to help improve our understanding of the spread of COVID-19, the company said today. Data for Good, which uses aggregated, anonymized data from Facebook’s apps to inform academic research, will now grant access to three new maps for forecasting the disease’s spread and revealing whether residents of a given region are staying at home. The company will also prompt Facebook users to participate in a…

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Is Canada Bad At Sharing Public Data? COVID-19 Rekindles An Old Debate | CBC News

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A debate that normally resides in the realm of wonkery roared to public attention this week, with Ottawa’s reluctance to release projections of the pandemic death toll. Is Canada bad at sharing public data? It’s a recurring obsession of journalists and researchers who use government data about things like health care, economics, crime and housing. By now, Americans haven’t just seen fatality projections. They have a one-stop site with estimates for all 50 states of how many deaths there might be, how many hospital beds and ventilators might be required,…

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Google’s COVID-19 Location Data Shows Regions That Are Violating Lockdown Orders. | Engadget

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Google has unveiled the COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports in an effort to help public health officials understand how people are moving about in response to the coronavirus pandemic. The reports show location data from folks who have agreed to share their location history with Google in order to show places that are following instructions to shelter in place — or not. “As global communities respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increasing emphasis on public health strategies, like social distancing measures, to slow the rate of transmission,” wrote…

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Email, Text Message Attacks Surge During COVID-19 Crisis | CBC News

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Cybersecurity experts describe it as a perfect storm: employees working from home — away from their firm’s IT experts and sometimes without the protection of a corporate computer network —  and hungry for information about a mysterious coronavirus. With the COVID-19 crisis as the backdrop, fraudsters appear to be redoubling their efforts to steal information or money from unsuspecting users, sending fake emails and text messages as bait, in a scheme known as phishing. In one scam, fraudsters pretend to be processing EI claims, preying on Canadians who’ve recently lost their jobs.…

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‘Internet Is The Only Lifeline They Have’: Canada Needs To Confront ‘Digital Divide’ Amid COVID-19 Crisis | CBC Radio

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The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing Canada to confront many of its hidden social inequalities, one of these being unequal access to the internet, an internet freedom advocate says. Laura Tribe, executive director of OpenMedia, says disproportionate access to the internet is often talked about in terms of only affecting the North or remote communities, however, the current public health crisis has shown the problem is just as common in many cities. “There are so many people throughout the country — even in urban areas — that don’t have the internet…

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Broadband Speeds Fall In Dozens Of Big US Cities During Pandemic | Ars Technica

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Home-Internet download speeds have fallen during the COVID-19 pandemic in dozens of the biggest US cities as millions of Americans stay home due to school and business closures. However, typical download speeds remain high enough to support normal broadband-usage patterns, with the vast majority of cities still above the Federal Communications Commission’s 25Mbps standard. In 88 of the 200 most populous US cities, Internet users “experienced some degree of network degradation over the past week compared to the 10 weeks prior,” BroadbandNow said in a report released Wednesday. Of those,…

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How Will The Coronavirus End? | The Atlantic

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The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out. Three months ago, no one knew that SARS-CoV-2 existed. Now the virus has spread to almost every country, infecting at least 446,000 people whom we know about, and many more whom we do not. It has crashed economies and broken health-care systems, filled hospitals and emptied public spaces. It has separated people from their workplaces and their friends. It has disrupted modern society on a scale that most…

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

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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…

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