A thread about fear of surveillance in times of COVID-19: A lot of the discussion seems weird to me. The cellphone companies have your (tower) location data, and people with unfettered access to SS7 do, too. Foreign SIGINT has this data (telco networks are prime targets...

...while not being terribly well-defended). The advertising giants have much more granular data to help sell you more cruises.

Odds are that your free fitness tracker app sells this data, or leaves it in an open S3 bucket.

If you live in a free democracy, granting access of this data *provided* the WHO has declared pandemic status (and not otherwise) poses little political risk in non-pandemic times - a single gov can't force the WHO.

I have no idea whether geolocation-based contact tracing is helpful, but a lot of the worriers about surveillance seem willfully ignorant of all the data that is already collected AND monetized. It shows how much society is in denial about the loss of privacy since...

... the arrival of smartphones.