Civil society organisations around the world have called on governments to ensure that the use of digital technologies to track and monitor individuals and populations for the coronavirus (Covid-19) is carried out strictly in line with human rights.

The organisations released a joint statement on Thursday and said States’ efforts to curb the Covid-19 outbreak should not be used as a “cover” to begin invasive digital surveillance.

They acknowledge that technology can and should play an important role during the pandemic to save lives, such as to spread public health messages and increase access to health care.

However, they say an increase in state digital surveillance powers, such as obtaining access to mobile phone location data, threatens privacy, freedom of expression and freedom of association, in ways that could violate rights and degrade trust in public authorities – undermining the effectiveness of any public health response.

“Such measures also pose a risk of discrimination and may disproportionately harm already marginalised communities.

These are extraordinary times, but human rights law still applies. Indeed, the human rights framework is designed to ensure that different rights can be carefully balanced to protect individuals and wider societies.”

They went on to say that States could not disregard privacy and freedom of expression in the name of tackling a public health crisis.

“On the contrary, protecting human rights also promotes public health. Now more than ever, governments must rigorously ensure that any restrictions to these rights is in line with long-established human rights safeguards,” they added.

They urged governments to ensure that surveillance measures adopted to address the pandemic must be lawful, necessary and proportionate.

The organisations also want surveillance powers to be time-bound, and only continue for as long as necessary to address the current pandemic.

They also ask for States to ensure that increased collection, retention, and aggregation of personal data, including health data, is only used for the purposes of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Data collected, retained, and aggregated to respond to the pandemic must be limited in scope, time-bound in relation to the pandemic and must not be used for commercial or any other purposes. We cannot allow the Covid-19 pandemic to serve as an excuse to gut individual’s right to privacy”.  

They also ask governments to take every effort to protect people’s data, including ensuring sufficient security of any personal data collected and of any devices, applications, networks, or services involved in collection, transmission, processing, and storage.

Furthermore, they added that any response must incorporate accountability protections and safeguards against abuse.

They also ask that an increased surveillance efforts related to COVID-19 should not fall under the domain of security or intelligence agencies and must be subject to effective oversight by appropriate independent bodies.