More than 170 UK researchers and scientists working in information security and privacy have signed a joint statement about their concerns over NHS plans to use a contact-tracing app to help contain the coronavirus outbreak, warning that the government must not create a tool that could be used for the purposes of surveillance.

Should the police be able to monitor what you’re doing in your backyard? City of Elizabeth officials think so. The police department is using drones to watch residents and broadcast warnings to those suspected of not following social distancing guidelines. The drones surveil areas that are not easy for officers to patrol with cars: parks, alleys, and yards behind houses.

The British government is helping a controversial Israeli spyware company to market its surveillance technologies at a secretive trade fair visited by repressive regimes, the Guardian can reveal.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union has scrapped the possibility of a ban on facial recognition technology in public spaces, according to the latest proposals seen by Reuters.

On the 11th of February 2020, The Washington Post and German ZDF revealed that from 1970 onwards, intelligence agencies in the US and West Germany secretly owned a controlling stake in the Swiss firm, Crypto AG. The intelligence agencies proceeded to use the company’s encrypted communications equipment to spy on over 100 countries.

The application Aarogya Setu, was created in India and aims to detect new cases coronavirus. The country's government has now imposed this application to all private sector employees. Earlier, the Indian government had made the application mandatory for all government employees, even those working in public sector organizations.

Video surveillance cameras in France will monitor how many people are wearing masks and their compliance with social distancing when the coronavirus lockdown is eased next week.

Marketing giant LiveRamp has privileged access to advertising accounts on the social network. Hackers took notice.

A Dutch COVID-19 tracking app has leaked user data as it made its source code available for scrutiny, according to local reports.

I’ve only spent an hour on Facebook in recent months, under a fake name. But a new feature proves that it knows a lot about what I’ve been doing online.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret.

On Dec. 26, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his mandate that Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry establish a new set of online rights for citizens. In doing so, Trudeau signaled an intent to overhaul data protection in Canada — a country that since 2004 has had in place the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, a law that has long served as a model for policymakers around the globe as they draft new legislation. Trudeau’s mandate requires enhanced rights for individuals, including rights to transfer their data across platforms; to withdraw, remove and erase basic personal information; to be notified and compensated when breaches occur; and to be protected against online discrimination.

An independent UN investigator has criticised the British government’s decision to host a surveillance company whose technology is allegedly used by repressive regimes to intercept the private messages of journalists and human rights activists.

US hasn't made evidence public but reportedly shared it with UK and Germany.

A secretive start-up promising the next generation of facial recognition software has compiled a database of images far bigger than anything ever constructed by the United States government: over three billion, it says. Is this technology a breakthrough for law enforcement — or the end of privacy as we know it?

Twenty years ago at a Silicon Valley product launch, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy dismissed concern about digital privacy as a red herring: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

Around the world, a diverse and growing chorus is calling for the use of smartphone proximity technology to fight COVID-19. In particular, public health experts and others argue that smartphones could provide a solution to an urgent need for rapid, widespread contact tracing—that is, tracking who infected people come in contact with as they move through the world. Proponents of this approach point out that many people already own smartphones, which are frequently used to track users’ movements and interactions in the physical world.