Mobile phones, and specifically phone data, are becoming a weapon for European governments in their fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
In late March, Belgian authorities turned to the country’s mobile phone providers to see if movement restrictions to slow the spread of the virus were being observed. The companies’ traffic data showed that Belgians spent about 80% of their time within their postal codes, suggesting they were largely complying with calls to stay at home – which helped authorities finalize plans for stricter lockdown rules.
“Aggregate mobility data helps us make more balanced decisions,” said Belgian Telecommunications Minister Philippe De Backer. “It helped us decide to continue these restrictive measures, rather than making them even stricter.”.
Now, as countries like Austria and Germany ease lockdowns, their governments want to leverage that data even more to keep the virus under control — raising some privacy concerns. Unlike Apple Inc.and Google , whose use of contact-tracing software that alerts users to the virus will be voluntary, mobile carriers inherently need access to a subscriber’s approximate location to route calls or texts.
In Belgium, the pandemic task force receives aggregated information showing movements between areas with two different postal codes and their duration.
The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is using data from Telenor ASA to help local authorities determine the number of hospital beds and intensive care. The institute has asked Telenor to break down the data by age and gender to better model the pandemic, a request the phone company is considering, said Kenth Engo-Monsen, a senior researcher at the operator.
Mobile phone location data will play an important role in easing restrictive measures, says Dirk Brockmann, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin and member of the infectious disease epidemiological modeling program at the Robert Koch Institute.
“It’s a very good measuring device for how people are responding to the loosening of restrictions,” said Brockmann, who has access to daily traffic updates from German phone companies.
While telecom operators stress that they only share aggregated and anonymized data in accordance with EU privacy rules, governments could pass specific laws to obtain data on people suspected of being infected, as they have done in China, for example.
Slovakia is one of the first European countries to pass such a law, giving government agencies access to individual phone data to stop the spread of the virus. In the United Kingdom, Germany and elsewhere, voluntary mobile apps are being developed to track infections.
Anonymized data is not subject to strict EU privacy rules – including user consent – as it is no longer considered personal information. But if aggregated location data can be traced back to an individual, that changes the nature of the data. It could reveal where someone spent the night, whether they have drug addictions or other deeply personal details.
Telecom companies use several steps to process such data. In Austria, A1 Telekom Austria AG encrypts and removes identifiers from raw location data before sending it to data processing company Invenium Data Insights GmbH. The data is sent in the form of a hashed ID that would take 100 years to decrypt, says Michael Cik, co-founder of Invenium.
While many companies are taking various steps, the process is still not secure. While data aggregation provides another layer of safeguards, privacy lawyers and experts say there are no clear industry standards. Data sets that are considered anonymous could identify someone if combined with another data set.
In a statement in early April, the Dutch data protection watchdog warned that “anonymization of this type of data is not possible.”.
Telecom providers, who are able to violate customer confidentiality, have tried to maintain control of the process.
Although they agreed to hand over aggregated data to the European Commission to help combat the spread of the virus, they raised questions about who would have access to the information and whether it would be combined with other data.
The EU says the data will be treated with the "highest security standards" and will not be processed in a way that could unintentionally identify individuals.
Back in Belgium, recent mobile data showed that Belgians increased their mobility during the holiday week after Easter, likely due to the sunny weather and fatigue.
“This was used to reinforce the message that the current measures must be kept in place and, most importantly, respected,” said a Belgian politician.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/europe
