EU privacy rules no obstacle to coronavirus fight; smartphone tracking a no-no

Women wearing protective face masks taking smartphone photographs at Trevi Fountain in Rome, Italy. A Hamburg geotracking startup called Ubilabs is working with the Hannover School of Medicine on a data analysis platform that could track people who have tested positive for the coronavirus and their contacts, Der Tagesspiegel reported. — Bloomberg

BERLIN: Europe's privacy rulebook does not create obstacles to taking action to curb the coronavirus epidemic but mass tracking of people's movements and contacts using smartphone location data would represent a clear violation.

Technophiles support the use of such data to reconstruct the movements of people exposed to the flu-like virus and identify others at risk of infection. Privacy advocates counter that this approach, used in China, subjects people to the kind of digital surveillance that has no place in a Western democracy.