Britain’s new £1 billion ($1.3m) pandemic strategy treats a future outbreak as a “certainty” and proposes building a contact tracing system that would feed on real-time location data harvested with the help of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
The plan, published by the Department of Health and Social Care, also calls for PPE stockpiles, new emergency legislation, and a biosecurity research hub in Essex.
But the centerpiece that deserves the most scrutiny is the contact tracing proposal, which would create a surveillance architecture designed to track the movements of millions of people, ready to switch on at a moment’s notice.
The UKHSA will run the new system, which the strategy document says will use “live location data” and artificial intelligence to provide “a more rapid, large-scale detection and alert system during pandemics.”
The agency plans to “explore options to work with ‘big tech’” to build it, with deployment targeted for 2030. The government is pre-building a location surveillance system in partnership with companies whose entire business model depends on harvesting as much personal data as possible.
The strategy doesn’t name which companies, what data-sharing agreements would look like, or what happens to your location history once the pandemic ends.
The UK government has already tracked its own citizens through their phones without telling them. A 2021 report by the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors (SPI-B) revealed that government-funded researchers tracked one in ten people in Britain via their mobile phones in February of that year, without the users’ knowledge or permission.
Researchers used cell phone mobility data to select over 4,200 vaccinated individuals, then monitored them through 40 call data records with corresponding location observations. The data was used for behavioral analysis, tracking radius of movement on vaccination day, whether people visited businesses during opening hours, and whether they went straight home afterwards. None of this was made public at the time.
When the tracking came to light, a spokesperson for Big Brother Watch said citizens would be “disturbed to discover they were unwittingly tracked and subjected to behavioral analysis via their phones.”
“No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government,” the spokesperson said. “This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality. Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake up call to us all.”
The government’s defense was that the data was collected at cell tower level, not the individual level, and that it was “GDPR-compliant” data provided by a company that “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” it.
Hellbound and Down 