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The Trump administration has come out against a proposed digital tracking system that could tell authorities about an individual’s vaccination history. The Orwellian measure has been proposed by technocratic oligarch Bill Gates, who is attempting to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to inch closer toward mandatory vaccinations. “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it,” Gates said during an “Ask Me Anything” appearance on Reddit about the coronavirus. Attorney General Bill Barr is skeptical of Gates’ idea to tag people with these mark-of-the-beast...

I have not seen this subject brought up anywhere. Is the gov't recording and filing all of these Chinese- Wuhan Virus test, antibody test etc. Tens of millions of these test will be performed, maybe most of the country when it is all over. Are the test being destroyed after checking for the Kung Flu? I would bet our DNA is being stored and cataloged by the gov't for future use. If so what will the gov't do with this info? Demand lifestyle chnages, Social Credit use, sterilize people with genetic defects?

Critics worry about a Patriot Act for health care, raising concerns about patient privacy and civil liberties. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system to give the government a near real-time view of where patients are seeking treatment and for what, and whether hospitals can accommodate them, according to four people with knowledge of the discussions. The proposed national network could help determine which areas of the country can safely relax social-distancing rules and which should remain vigilant. But it would also...

Americans are going to transit stations, retail and recreation locations and workplaces much less frequently now than they were just a month ago, according to a new mobility project from Google that traces human movements worldwide. The U.S. tech giant said it's creating Community Mobility Reports for nations around the world that detail people's daily movements based on data gathered from its Maps platform and other mobile services. Google said the data are collected in a way that protects individual privacy and gives healthcare officials a view on how the coronavirus pandemic has changed people's movements, routines and habits worldwide....

Paris (AFP) - Google will publish location data from its users around the world from Friday to allow governments to gauge the effectiveness of social distancing measures put in place to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech giant said. The reports on users' movements in 131 countries will be made available on a special website and will "chart movement trends over time by geography," according to a post on one of the company's blogs. Trends will be display "a percentage point increase or decrease in visits" to locations like parks, shops, homes and places of work, not "the absolute number...

The government is preparing to release an app which alerts people if they come too close to someone who has tested positive for COIVD-19, Sky News can reveal. The contact tracking app, which will operate on an opt-in basis, will be released either just before or just after the lockdown is lifted, according to several people with close knowledge of the project. NHS bosses hope the app will attract more than 50% of the population, as large numbers of people using it together will be necessary for it to work effectively. The existence of the app, which was first revealed...

Want to know which California counties are evidently not doing a very good job of obeying the statewide shelter-in-place order that has been in effect for over a week now? The data company Unacast, a firm that collects cell phone location data for private companies, created an interactive map that shows which counties in California and beyond are correctly "socially distancing" by staying at home. Each county and state is graded on an A-F basis on the "change in average mobility," or the decline in distance traveled since quarantine measures were first put in place. "To calculate the actual underlying...

TEL AVIV - Israel’s defense ministry plans to use software that analyses data gathered from mobile phones - produced, according to Israeli media, by the spyware firm NSO - to help locate likely carriers of the coronavirus in order to test them. Defense Minister Naftali Bennett told reporters that the “coronameter” would need approval from the cabinet - likely to be given - as well as an assessment of privacy issues from the attorney general, who has the power to block it. But it could be operational within 48 hours of getting the go-ahead. Israel already tests around 5,000 people...

The ONC interoperability rule is a step in the right direction towards a nationwide health data exchange and enhanced interoperability. The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has put the importance of health data exchange and interoperability under a microscope. Niam Yaraghi, a fellow in governance studies at the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings Institution, penned an op-ed to explain why he thinks the US lacks health information technologies to stop or contain the COVID-19 epidemic. “The pandemic has shattered our common beliefs about the type and scope of health information exchange (HIE),” wrote Yaraghi. “It has shown us that...

The overall best VPN services encrypt all your internet traffic and pass it through a private tunnel to their own secure servers so that no one can see what you're reading or downloading - not the government, not your ISP, not even the VPN service itself.Very simply, a VPN (short for virtual private network) is an app you can download for your mobile or laptop that allows you to hide your location, identity and IP address from the rest of the internet.All internet content is completely encrypted - securely jumbled so no one could read it even if they intercepted...

BEIJING - China’s coronavirus outbreak has tested the limits of free speech on the country’s heavily censored online and social media, with a brief window of liberalization that opened during January subsequently slammed shut by authorities. The period from Jan 19 to Feb 1, when public concern about the coronavirus exploded just as China was gearing up for the Lunar New Year holiday, saw an uncharacteristic loosening. Online buzz about the outbreak flourished, with netizens largely unfettered in criticizing local authorities - but not central government leaders - over their handling of the crisis. That liberalisation has come to end,...

When the man from Hangzhou returned home from a business trip, the local police got in touch. They had tracked his car by his license plate in nearby Wenzhou, which has had a spate of coronavirus cases despite being far from the epicenter of the outbreak. Stay indoors for two weeks, they requested. After around 12 days, he was bored and went out early. This time, not only did the police contact him, so did his boss. He had been spotted near Hangzhou’s West Lake by a camera with facial recognition technology, and the authorities had alerted his company as...

In years gone by there existed an understanding that one’s personal information surrendered to private companies was a voluntary choice – the “cost,” if you will, to obtaining the benefit of a company’s goods or services. Importantly – and constitutionally – such a “trade off” was far different from the government obtaining personal and private information by way of surveillance or other information-gathering actions undertaken without a warrant. There was a relatively clear line between private company collection of personal information voluntarily provided, and the government gathering such information without one’s knowledge or consent. Today, that “line” has been blurred...

Ring doorbells are providing customer data to companies such as Facebook and Google, an investigation suggests. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found the Ring app was "packed" with third-party tracking, sending out customers' personally identifiable information. Five companies were receiving a range of information, including names, IP addresses and mobile networks, it said. Ring said it limited the amount of data it shared. The company told Gizmodo: "Like many companies, Ring uses third-party service providers to evaluate the use of our mobile app, which helps us improve features, optimise the customer experience and evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing." But the...

The more we talk about freedom (of speech, of assembly, to carry guns, religion) in the world today occupied and controlled by everything progressive, the more we hear the chains rattling I wrote before about the 2006 Oscar winner for the best Foreign Language Film, “Das Leben des Anderen” (The Lives of Others), a German drama that describes in painful detail life in the communist East Berlin of 1984, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how ordinary and not so ordinary citizens were spied upon by their government, using agents of the infamous Stasi, the German Democratic Republic’s secret...

New students at the University of Missouri will be required to participate in a tracking program designed to measure and enforce class attendance, according to a new report from The Kansas City Star. Despite privacy concerns, officials defended the decision as one to the benefit of students, as the school's athletics department has already been using the same app, SpotterEdu, to track certain student-athletes.

Sales for some at-home DNA testing kits are on the decline amid consumer privacy concerns. 23andMe, the home DNA-testing company, is laying off about 100 people, nearly 14 percent of its staff, the company confirmed to FOX Business Friday. The company cut staffers in its operations department in charge of growing and scaling the company as fewer people pay for genetic test results which can reveal things about their heritage or how prone they are to health conditions like type 2 diabetes or celiac disease, according to a CNBC report. The declining sales came as a surprise for CEO Anne...

Until recently, Hoan Ton-That’s greatest hits included an obscure iPhone game and an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos. Then Mr. Ton-That — an Australian techie and onetime model — did something momentous: He invented a tool that could end your ability to walk down the street anonymously, and provided it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies, ranging from local cops in Florida to the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. His tiny company, Clearview AI, devised a groundbreaking facial recognition app. You take a picture of a person, upload it...

Conference goers now have to be wary that robots will identify them everywhere they go. Corporations can now rent Chinese-made CloudMinds robots that can identify everyone on the conference floor. (To learn more about CloudMinds and China click here & here.) CloudMinds mission is to “make helpful robot services possible and to make them safe, secure and affordable.” While their hidden mission is to help governments identify everyone. According to CloudMinds “About Us” page, their so-called values are to convince employees, moms, dads and their children to trust rentable emotion and facial recognition robots. We make helpful robot Their rent-a-robot...

Google on Tuesday announced it would begin phasing third-party cookies out of its Chrome web browser, following in the steps of competitors Safari and Firefox. However, unlike those two companies that banned cookies outright, Google will phase out their support for cookies "within two years," Justin Schuh, director at engineering for Chrome, wrote in a blog post. "Some browsers have reacted to these concerns by blocking third-party cookies, but we believe this has unintended consequences that can negatively impact both users and the web ecosystem," he continued. Google cited user concerns about cookies including privacy and data collection, pledging to...