EU use of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps raises data protection & digital surveillance concerns
"New warning on virus apps' digital privacy safeguards," 12 May 2020
National authorities have already released or plan to roll out contact-tracing apps across the EU...[to] make it easier and quicker for health authorities to alert or find those potentially exposed to the coronavirus...Amnesty International warned...that the use of surveillance technologies to combat Covid-19 is...not compatible with international human rights standards and could even lead to a more intrusive digital surveillance state...MEPs on the European Parliament's committee on civil liberties warned last week that "whenever personal data is processed in the context of fighting Covid-19, data protection rules are indispensable".
[T]he Hungarian government suspended certain rights under the EU's data protection rules until the end of the state of emergency...[limiting]... rights... [in the] General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... [including] the right to access personal data, the right to not be subjected to profiling or the right to be forgotten.