Digitalisation

The coronavirus pandemic forced half of the German working population to work from home. A majority was happy with the move, an early study indicates. If the broadband expansion catches up in the countryside, many might never go back.

The Indian government faces strong pushback from civil society for mandating the use of a privacy-intrusive COVID-19 tracing app. The heated legal debate resembles the previous one over the country’s controversial biometric ID system Aadhaar.

A strong sense of regional sovereignty in the Canadian health care system may lead to different choices for technologies to track and contain the spread of the coronavirus. A multiplicity of non-interoperable apps could put their effectiveness in question and could create inconsistent approaches to privacy.

Tech will not free us from coronavirus, but it can provide us with helpful tools – if we foster an open and democratic debate on how to use it. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the use of digital technologies that are shaping people's lives and interaction with society. The development of apps to monitor the movements and health status of individual citizens will have long-term implications for privacy and safety. Nowhere is this more visible than in Asia.

Disinformation is out of control as malicious actors seek to capitalise on the Covid-19 pandemic. To date, EU schemes to tackle disinformation have focused on self regulation, but there are widespread concerns about how the EU is managing the crisis. 

The debate over the data storage model of a coronavirus tracing app shows how the German government’s search for digital infection control tools became caught up between public health officials, privacy experts and the US tech industry. 

As European countries turn to apps to contain the pandemic, the EU must weigh the public health emergency against its own data protection rules. Policymakers and experts on data protection and privacy in Brussels warn that tracing and monitoring technology can undermine fundamental rights.

App developers and state governments in the United States are churning out new technologies for tracking the spread of the coronavirus. In the absence of a national privacy law, experts raise concerns about surveillance and scramble to define the boundaries for data collection during the pandemic.

With a series of digital measures introduced in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Morocco is creating a trade-off between ways to provide rapid support and the parallel development of digital control.