Analysis of efforts by 25 governments to track the COVID-19 pandemic using new surveillance programs, such as using location data or releasing an app
At least 28 countries are ramping up surveillance to combat the coronavirus — an attempt to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic …
Context & Ripple Effects
This analysis lands mid-arc in a fast-moving story. In March, researchers were already testing contact-monitoring apps after China and South Korea used smartphones to track people with COVID-19, and by late May the toolkit had broadened into an international survey of smartphone data, drones, facial recognition, and AI deployed by governments worldwide (VentureBeat's overview).
What makes this piece worth reading is that it captures the moment before the backlash: within three months, countries that raced to deploy tracking software were fielding complaints over extensive data mining and poor security practices (the NYT reported), and by October research across 65 countries concluded governments had used the pandemic to expand domestic surveillance and curtail internet freedom (Wired). The 25-government count here is the baseline against which those later findings are measured.
First-order effects
- At least 25 governments gain new legal and technical infrastructure for location tracking and app-based monitoring of citizens, with health authorities as the immediate operators and telecoms and app stores as the data conduits.
- Citizens in those countries face a new choice architecture: download a state-endorsed tracing app or accept location-data collection as the price of pandemic response.
Second-order effects
- Privacy advocates and security researchers shift from hypothetical objections to auditing live deployments — the path that led to documented complaints about data mining and weak security in the tracking apps by July.
- Vendors of surveillance tooling (drone makers, facial-recognition firms, data brokers) get a crisis-driven sales channel into public health, normalizing customers they had not previously served.
Third-order effects
- Emergency powers adopted under pandemic conditions tend to persist: the 65-country research finding that surveillance expanded and internet freedom contracted suggests temporary programs are hardening into standing capabilities.
- Public trust becomes the binding constraint on digital public-health tools — deployments perceived as surveillance-first risk abandonment, pushing later designs toward decentralized, privacy-preserving architectures.
The trend: Pandemic-era contact tracing is the largest real-world test yet of emergency surveillance powers, and its trajectory — from rapid deployment to documented abuse and permanence — is shaping how democracies govern state access to citizen data.