For anyone living in the United States right now could be a subject to mass surveillance according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal. Today when the Coronavirus outbreak has stunned almost all countries with the US leading with the most number of infected people, countries are going under a massive lockdown with the economy taking a hit and so are the hundreds of people dying every day due to the exponentially growing rate of novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 disease.
Apparently, the Federal and State government in the United States are taking location data of millions of citizens in the countries in order to understand how people move across various cities. The report states that this move is to better understand population clusters and how they move about in the country during the coronavirus outbreak and how they could use the geo-location data to prepare a response accordingly.
The report adds that where feds are collecting location data of millions of citizens, the data is being shared with state and local governments. The data helps them detect movement and gatherings in over 500 cities as well as to detect movement in the COVID-19 hotspots where the number of people getting affected with the virus could exponentially double. On the other hand, the report does mention that although the location data is being stored and scanned for, the identification of people has been stripped off to keep the data anonymous.
