Tag: privacy concerns

BeiDou a threat to the West, but perhaps not individuals

Recent completion of China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system has rekindled privacy and security concerns among some in the West. China has incorporated a two-way messaging capability into BeiDou that many fear will be used to track individuals and install malware on user devices.

Most satellite navigation experts view such concerns as far overblown.

At the same time, though little discussed, BeiDou’s completion does signal a new phase for China’s status as a world power and its ability to challenge the West on many fronts.

Two-way communications

It is possible for specially equipped receivers to communicate back to the BeiDou constellation. But this is not true for the vast majority of receivers (including those in cell phones). Industry experts say that all mass market chips for every GNSS system, including BeiDou, are “receive only.” Only specially equipped devices will be able to take advantage of its two-way communications capability, and it should be quite apparent to users when it is in operation.

Users, they say, should be much more concerned about location privacy and security issues that have been around for decades. Mobile phones have long reported user locations through the cellular network based upon information derived from GPS, WiFi ranging and other position calculations. The ability to hack and compromise a cell phone or other receiver will not be affected by the addition of BeiDou as a receive-only location source.

It is also important to note that using specialized equipment for two-way communication with a Global Satellite Navigation System (GNSS) is not something new to BeiDou. While the Chinese system may have improved upon the capability, users with the right equipment can send messages using the Search and Rescue functions to the United States’ GPS, Europe’s Galileo, and Russia’s GLONASS.

China has risen

Completion of BeiDou, unquestionably a significant technical achievement, does signal a significant step up for Chin’s status as a world power and influencer. It is a declaration of technical independence from the West with wide ranging geo-political impacts.

These were anticipated and summarized in a 2017 report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. It listed China’s goals for BeiDou as:

“(1) address national security requirements by ending military reliance on GPS;
(2) build a commercial downstream satellite navigation industry to take advantage of the quickly expanding market; and
(3) achieve domestic and international prestige by fielding one of only four such global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) yet developed”

Military Power and National Security. The Chinese military has long sought its own GNSS. This was amplified during a crisis in 1996 when it fired three missiles toward Taiwan as a warning. One struck the sea about 11 miles from a Taiwanese military base, but the other two disappeared. China claims that the United States interfered with GPS signals and was to blame. The Chinese military was both horrified and humiliated.

Having a sovereign GNSS eliminates the problem of relying on the U.S., Russia, or Europe for satellite navigation. That it is the world’s newest system also certainly has its advantages. China has undoubtedly incorporated state of the art anti-jamming and anti-spoofing capabilities into the version of BeiDou used by the military. After decades of observing others interfering with GNSS signals, and doing a fair bit of it on their own, it would be hard to imagine Chinese engineers not including the latest resilience features.

An operational BeiDou also means that China’s military is much freer to interfere with GPS and other GNSS in pursuit of tactical and strategic advantage without endangering its own services and infrastructure. It is likely that the levels of jamming and spoofing seen near the Spratley Islands and mainland ports will increase. Even if they do not, the increased possibility of Chinese interference will add yet another degree of complexity and uncertainty for western military forces.

Economic Power. The technological and commercial benefits of BeiDou for China are unquestionably substantial as well. Direct benefit from the manufacture and sale of equipment, plus spinoff industries and technologies, add to an already impressive national technology and economic portfolio. This is especially true since positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services are a “silent utility” underpinning so many network and other technological systems. The huge domestic market and robust overseas sales continue to grow (by 20% per annum according to Chinese reports) providing huge returns.

Prestige and Soft Power. “BeiDou launch marks China’s rise to ‘major space power’” read a recent headline in the Asia Times. This is perhaps understated as, with BeiDou complete, there is, technologically, little the West has achieved that China has not equaled. This has greatly enhanced China’s global standing and made it, in the eyes of many in the developing world, an ally and provider as good or better than the U.S. or Europe.

And China is eager to share its new PNT utility with others to further, not just its economy, but more importantly its long-term strategic interests.

Forsaking GPS

Regionally, China has been encouraging neighbors to adopt BeiDou for national PNT and forsake GPS. As one example it provided Thailand with nearly $300M in foreign aid targeted to promoting BeiDou use by Thai government organizations.

Writing in July in The Diplomat, Dr. Namrata Goswami observed

“… BeiDou is located within China’s ‘Information Silk Road,’ a subset of its land and maritime silk routes under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). China is now able to extend influence in a multidomain environment (land, sea and space) via its BeiDou space system, which provides navigation to aircraft, submarines, missiles, as well as commercial services dependent on such navigation. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology sells the Information Silk Road, to include BeiDou and 5G networks, to global audiences as a completely self-sufficient technology infrastructure that anticipates life in the 21st century.”

This extends China’s influence through BeiDou even farther and has led a number of nations to seek closer ties with China through BeiDou.

Mohamed Ben Amor, secretary general of the Tunisia-based Arab Information and Communication Technology Organization, an organization of the Arab League, told GPSDaily.com, “Cooperation on the BDS is of special significance for the Belt and Road construction…The next step of the China-Arab cooperation is to achieve further connectivity and both sides can apply the BDS to promote regional technological and economic development.”

Iran’s view

Iran has had a Memorandum of Understanding with China about BeiDou since 2015. It provides for BeiDou ground stations in Iran, access for Iran to high-precision services, and establishment of an Iranian center for space data collection.

And In a tweet last week Iran’s Ambassador to China cited BeiDou’s completion as the “…end to the monopoly of the U.S.’s GPS.” He said, “There is great potential for aerospace cooperation with China,” and went on to suggest that Iranian aerospace students could work as a bridge between the two countries.

Similar comments have been published from entities in India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and throughout Southeast Asia.

China is indeed to be congratulated for a significant achievement with the completion of BeiDou. Even more noteworthy, though, is how it has integrated BeiDou seamlessly into its national plans for technology, economic, military and diplomatic efforts — a comprehensive, coordinated program to boost its standing in the world, especially relative to the United States and Europe.

Dana Goward is president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. He is the proprietor at Maritime Governance LLC. In August 2013, he retired from the federal Senior Executive Service, having served as the maritime navigation authority for the United States. As director of Marine Transportation Systems for the U.S. Coast Guard, he led 12 different navigation-related business lines budgeted at more than $1.3 billion per year. He has represented the U.S. at IMO, IALA, the UN anti-piracy working group and other international forums. A licensed helicopter and fixed-wing pilot, he has also served as a navigator at sea and is a retired Coast Guard Captain.

Photo: XinhuaNet

August 11, 2020
WGIC: Geospatial analytics at forefront of COVID-19 fight

One industry important to the world’s fight and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is geospatial analytics. In response, the World Geospatial Industry Council (WGIC) has created an informat ion hub for COVID-19 information.

“These are very uniquely challenging times for our industry. At the same time, our industry has stood up to assist the world, especially the key decision-makers and frontline workers to understand the scenarios on the ground,” said Harsha Vardhan, WGIC associate director. “Spatial analytics-based decision making has come to the forefront during these times.”

Governments are using location tracking in combination with personal data to track and combat COVID-19, and the use of location technology in conjunction with personal data is of high relevance and usage, Vardhan said. “This scenario brings before us the aspects of data privacy, data protection, and the role of geospatial information.”

In March, WGIC published a report titled “Geospatial Information and Privacy: Policy Perspectives and Imperatives for the Geospatial Industry.” Vardhan said the report is even more significant now. WGIC is hosting a webinar on the report on May 14 at 11 a.m. ET.

April 27, 2020
GPS tracking need not sit out COVID-19 because of privacy laws

Photo: AntonioGuillem/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

Commentary by Jeremy Meisinger

Jeremy Meisinger

The scale and speed of the COVID-19 crisis has left policymakers searching for new tools to address an unprecedented challenge. Everything from faster testing to new treatments to more supplies for frontline providers is needed, and smart deployment of these resources requires an ability to track infections that is not yet available for a problem of the scale of COVID-19.

The recent economic stimulus package passed by Congress — the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (“CARES Act”) – looks to fund this kind of tracking. Among its many priorities, the CARES Act appropriates half a billion dollars to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for modernization of its public health data surveillance capabilities, and specifically directs the CDC to report to Congress on the development of a “public health surveillance and data collection system for coronavirus within 30 days.”

The legislation does not give much in the way of additional direction to the CDC, meaning that the CDC is likely to think expansively and look for proven models in other highly developed public health systems.

Disease surveillance efforts around the world have taken a variety of approaches, in many cases informed by experience in battling prior pandemics. Public health systems in places such as South Korea, Singapore and China were built on the lessons of the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and similar conditions over the past several years.

Location-based tracking using GPS provides greater insight and precision than, for example, asking an infected patient to remember and re-trace his or her steps.

Among many other elements, these systems frequently employ GPS-enabled smartphone apps both to gather information and to target alerts to local populations. Location-based tracking using GPS provides greater insight and precision than, for example, asking an infected patient to remember and re-trace his or her steps.

As discussions of similar solutions have begun in the United States, privacy advocates have rightly pointed out the risks inherent in systems that necessarily gather and communicate health information and pair that information with location-based information provided by GPS. But both legally and practically, there need not be an exclusive choice between health information privacy and using GPS and other technology to gather and provide information about COVID-19.

On the legal front, HIPAA broadly exempts disclosures of protected health information for public health activities, allowing disclosures to public health authorities without first obtaining patient consent. Similarly, HIPAA permits data to be de-identified — subject to recognized standards laid out in regulations and guidance — and thereafter shared and used for research purposes, including public health research and similar purposes.

Legal avenues certainly exist to permit significant information sharing about COVID-19 in order to help protect public health.

Furthermore, federal authorities tasked with enforcing HIPAA have already signaled in guidance that they will take a flexible approach to enforcement in order to meet the exigencies of the crisis. Thus, while it is true that HIPAA has not been applied directly to a public health emergency on the scale of COVID-19, legal avenues certainly exist to permit significant information sharing about COVID-19 in order to help protect public health.

On the practical front, HIPAA also points the way to sensible decision-making that balances privacy interests with the needs of the crisis. First, de-identification provides a significant opportunity to share data in a way that is protective of privacy. Second, we should not assume that widespread participation — both in information gathering and information dissemination — must be involuntary in order to be widely adopted.

Smartphones users can — and should — be given a choice before enabling tracking features on their devices, just as they can and should be informed in a transparent way about what data would and would not be shared. HIPAA establishes a “minimum necessary” standard that should provide the guiding principle here: no more information should be shared than is necessary to accomplish the intended objective.

As we search quickly for tools to enable the kind of tracking that we have not undertaken before, we should be careful not to construct a false dilemma between privacy and efficacy — the two go hand in hand. Strong and transparent privacy protections are both possible and necessary to secure the public buy-in that is necessary to make public health surveillance work.

Jeremy Meisinger is a Boston-based attorney at Foley Hoag LLP.

April 8, 2020
19 countries track mobile location to fight COVID-19

In moves sure to concern privacy advocates, 19 countries are now accessing citizens’ mobile location data in an effort to fight the coronavirus outbreak.

A COVID-19 Digital Rights Tracker by Top10VPN lists countries that are using mobile data for the pandemic. Uses range from anonymous aggregated data to monitor the general movement of people, to tracking the phones of individual coronavirus patients, to tracking suspected patients and their contacts, known as “contact tracing.”

“In the past week we have witnessed a 90% growth in the number of countries implementing digital tracking measures and a 100% increase in reports of censorship,” reported Top10VPN on March 26.

Actions by country

Photo: AntonioGuillem/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images

In the United States, the Senate’s $2 trillion economic stimulus bill includes $500 million for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to launch a new “surveillance and data-collection system” to monitor the spread of COVID-19, reports Business Insider.

Europe’s telecom companies are sharing location data with health authorities in Italy, Germany and Austria, according to Reuters, to check whether people are remaining at home. The data is aggregated and anonymous, mapping concentrations rather than individuals to respect Europe’s privacy laws.

In South Korea, the government created a map of cellphone data provided by telecom and credit card companies. The map was made public so everyone could track whether they’d been exposed, according to The Verge.

According to reports, Iran used the COVID-19 epidemic to gather private data from its citizens “to boost Tehran’s surveillance capabilities,” reports Vice. The country sent a link to download the AC19 app with government endorsement, touting it as a way to determine whether users have the virus, but usage required sending back location data.

In Taiwan, a mobile phone-based geo-fence uses location-tracking to ensure people who are quarantined stay in their homes, reports the New York Times. If the patient leaves their home address or turns off their smartphone, the police will visit within 15 minutes.

SafePaths app

The new Private Kit: SafePaths app, developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers, is now available, though it is still under development. The downloadable app (for IOS and Android 8.0 and above) informs users if they’ve crossed paths with coronavirus patients, known through published data.

“The solution is a ‘pull’ model where users can download encrypted location information about carriers so the users can self-determine their likely exposure to COVID-19 and coordinate their response with their doctor using their symptoms and personal health history,” according to a white paper about the contact-tracing app.

The app takes privacy into consideration — COVID-19 patients consent to provide health officials with an accurate location trail once they are diagnosed. “Governments are equipped with a tool to redact location trails and thus broadcast location information with privacy protection for diagnosed carriers and local businesses,” the white paper reads.

“Since the outbreak of COVID-19, governments around the world have implemented a range of digital tracking, physical surveillance and censorship measures in a bid to slow the spread of the virus,” warns Top10VPN. “Some of these may well be proportionate, necessary and legitimate during these unprecedented times. However, others have been rushed through legislative bodies and implemented without adequate scrutiny.”

March 26, 2020