Pandemic exploited to normalise mass surveillance, watchdog warns

The COVID-19 pandemic was exploited as an excuse to further normalise surveillance and monitor an increasing number of daily activities of people around the world under the guise of public health, a tech watchdog warned on Thursday. Since the onset of the coronavirus crisis, a slew of automated decision-making (ADM) systems were adopted in haste and with almost no transparency, no adequate safeguards, and insufficient democratic debate, according to AlgorithmWatch, a non-profit that tracks ADM systems and their impacts on society. Its "Tracing the Tracers" project in a new report includes the findings of a yearlong monitoring of the implementation of the ADM systems – including systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) – in Europe and beyond. The Berlin, Germany-based group warns that the situation regarding ADM systems is even worse than before the COVID-19 pandemic began because they now include potentially life-saving tools. Some examples of ADM systems include digital contact tracing (DCT) apps and digital COVID certificates (DCC).