Bahrain, Kuwait and Norway in the viewfinder. The human rights organization Amnesty International warned on Tuesday that the tracking applications developed by these three countries to contain the spread of the new coronavirus were "among the most dangerous for privacy".
Many countries have turned to mobile technologies to track the movement of people and those they come into contact with, allowing authorities to trace the Covid-19 contamination chains.
"Bahrain, Kuwait and Norway have made little of the privacy of individuals, with highly invasive surveillance tools that go far beyond what is justified in the fight against Covid-19," said in a press release Claudio Guarnieri, head of the Security Lab of Amnesty International.
A detailed technical analysis of 11 applications has demonstrated, according to the NGO, that those implemented by these three countries make it possible to "follow live or almost direct the movements of users", the GPS coordinates being frequently downloaded by a database. government data in real time, "which is probably neither necessary nor proportionate". Less invasive applications use Bluetooth connections to detect the interactions of users infected with the disease.
Personal data of exposed users
Norwegian authorities said on Monday that they will suspend their Smittestopp application after the national data protection agency Datatilsynet has decided to ban the Norwegian Institute of Public Health from '' use the information obtained via this tool.
"We also call on the Bahraini and Kuwaiti governments to immediately stop using these applications in their current form," wrote Claudio Guarnieri.
The Arab Gulf States, bordering Iran, the most affected country in the Middle East, have implemented very strict containment or even movement control measures to halt the spread of the new coronavirus on their respective territories.
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At the end of May, a security breach in the Qatari application for tracking infected people was revealed and denounced by Amnesty International, because it exposed the personal data of more than a million users to cyberattacks. The defect in the code of this application, the use of which is compulsory, has been corrected following the report by the NGO.