Is your COVID contact tracing information being misused?
Now with compulsory COVID check-ins at eateries, places of worship and even some retail stores, you can’t go anywhere without giving up your personal details for the purpose of contact tracing.
However, are some companies asking for too much information which could lead to a security breach of your personal information?
Many places of business are opting to use electronic check-ins which are outsourced to registration platforms that are often owned by companies that deal in collecting data.
Experts in privacy and cybersecurity are warning of making personal data vulnerable to exploitation.
A professor of law and information systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Graham Greenleaf said, "Governments have made collection compulsory, without exercising supervision about how it is carried out."
There are also concerns that the data could possibly be resold, used for identity fraud or to track a person's location and even could be used in micro-targeted advertising for misinformation campaigns.
Justin Warren, from privacy and digital rights group Electronic Frontier Australia (EFA) has expressed his concern, "We have a lot of people whose primary business is running a cafe, they're not technical experts.
"[These] conditions really lend to mistakes that people will regret later on. With privacy, once you've lost it, it's kind of gone forever."
The NSW Government announced in June that businesses unable to record visitor details would not be permitted to reopen after the COVID lockdown and that heavy fines would be issued for non-compliance.
It also outlined that customers must be informed about what information was being collected, that it should be stored securely, that its only purpose is for contact tracing and it should be destroyed once it was no longer relevant.
"The regulations are pretty prescriptive, so they say here in Victoria it's just a first name and a contact number.
"But some of these applications are asking for a lot more information than that including things like last name, email address and other things they could use to potentially track you."
Irit Jackson, 2nd November 2020
