Britain, Italy, Germany eye smartphone location data to stem Coronavirus spread

Britain, Germany and Italy are evaluating powerful and invasive tools for what epidemiologists call contact-tracing, the mapping of personal interactions that could spread the virus. These apps would use real-time phone data to pinpoint virus carriers and people they might have infected.

That worries privacy advocates, who fear such ubiquitous surveillance could be abused without careful oversight, with potentially dire consequences for civil liberties.

“These are testing times, but they do not call for untested new technologies,” a group of mostly British activists said in an open letter Monday to the country’s National Health Service. The letter noted that such measures put human right at risk and may not work.