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Edward Snowden at the 2019 Web Summit.
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  • Edward Snowden said in an interview on Monday that increased surveillance amid the coronavirus outbreak could lead to long-lasting erosion of civil liberties.
  • Specifically, he theorized that states might demand access to people's health data — such as their heart rate — from wearables.
  • Countries have been rapidly ramping up their surveillance of citizens to study and curb the spread of the virus, ranging from mapping anonymized phone location data to highly invasive powers, like allowing the security services to track people's phones without a warrant.
  • Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Edward Snowden, the man who exposed the breadth of spying at the US's National Security Agency, has warned that an uptick in surveillance amid the coronavirus crisis could lead to long-lasting effects on civil liberties.


Fear of the virus and its spread could mean governments "send an order to every fitness tracker that can get something like pulse or heart rate" and demand access to that data, Snowden said.

"Five years later the coronavirus is gone, this data's still available to them — they start looking for new things," Snowden said. "They already know what you're looking at on the internet, they already know where your phone is moving, now they know what your heart rate is. What happens when they start to intermix these and apply artificial intelligence to them?"




In Poland, citizens under quarantine have to download a government app that mandates they respond to periodic requests for selfies. Taiwan has introduced an "electronic fence" system that alerts the police if quarantined patients move outside their homes.

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SEE ALSO: 11 countries are now using people's phones to track the coronavirus pandemic, and it heralds a massive increase in surveillance

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