Australian authorities used phone location tracking to follow people with coronavirus

With coronavirus continuing to spread and world governments doing what they can to halt it, it was inevitable that data privacy would enter the fray at some point.

That’s exactly what happened in Australia this week. ABC reported that law enforcement are using phone tracking technology to retrace the movements of a Chinese couple who traveled from Guangzhou to Adelaide in January while they were unknowingly infected with the virus.

Australian police told ABC that the measure was taken out of concern for public safety. The two tourists may not have known enough about the areas they visited to paint a complete picture of where they’d been, so police used exceptions carved out in Australia’s telecommunications privacy laws to check where their phones had been. 

Media reports indicate the Chinese couple has been compliant with authorities despite a language barrier, so there’s no indication they were strong-armed into giving up their data or anything.

A real estate company that the couple visited for a house auction has resulted in that company and its staff going into lockdown while they attempt to reach others who attended the auction.

It’s also worth pointing out that authorities didn’t track the couple’s movements in the same way Google Maps might. Your cell phone “pings” a cell tower when it’s used, and cell carriers can keep that information on file to evaluate their networks, among other things. It also happens to turn your phone into a location tracker, whether you know it or not, and turning off location services doesn’t fix it.

You’d be justified in thinking that sounds scary, but tracking location via cell tower pings doesn’t necessarily reveal any other information about the people in question. It creates a map of movements, but doesn’t include any other information stored on the phones themselves. Authorities in the U.S. have used this technique to solve crimes for years, but a Supreme Court ruling in 2018 said that police need a warrant to access that information going forward.

The spread of a deadly disease certainly seems like a reasonable excuse to use this location data that people can’t opt out of even if they want to do that. That isn’t always going to be the case going forward, which is certainly fun to think about and not at all dystopian.