Could COVID-19 Kickstart Surveillance Culture?

The coronavirus pandemic has sparked a new period of growth and development for facial recognition technology. Creators pitch their tools as a means to identify sick individuals without risking close-contact investigation. The marketing pitch is tempting in these anxious, fearful times, but in practice, using facial recognition to track the virus can be downright terrifying. The White House has opened talks with major tech companies, including Facebook and Google, to assess whether using aggregated location data sourced from our mobile phones would facilitate better containment of the virus.