BRUSSELS (Reuters) – Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Orange and five other telecoms providers have agreed to share mobile phone location data with the European Commission to track the spread of the coronavirus, lobbying group GSMA said on Wednesday.
FILE PHOTO: A man, wearing a protective mask, checks his mobile phone in central Madrid, Spain, March 14, 2020. REUTERS/Sergio Perez
The companies, including Telefonica, Telecom Italia , Telenor, Telia and A1 Telekom Austria met with EU industry chief Thierry Breton on Monday.
Worries about governments’ use of technology to monitor those in quarantine and track infections have intensified in recent weeks over possible privacy violations, with some raising the spectre of state surveillance.
The Commission will use anonymised data to protect privacy and aggregate mobile phone location data to coordinate measures tracking the spread of the virus, an EU official said.
To further assuage privacy concerns, the data will be deleted once the…
Source Reuters Tech News
Source link
