Group: Pandemic tech tools raise risk of everyday tracking

By KELVIN CHAN
AP Business Writer

LONDON (AP) — A new report group says digital contact tracing apps, artificial intelligence and other tech tools that European governments rolled out to combat COVID-19 failed to play a key role in solving the pandemic and now threaten to make such monitoring widely accepted. The nonprofit research group AlgorithmWatch said Thursday that the health surveillance technologies many countries deployed were often adopted without enough transparency, safeguards or democratic debate. The group acknowledges that technology played a role in helping save some lives. But it says the most worrying trend is how the pandemic has been used to “further entrench and normalize the surveillance, monitoring, measuring and prediction of an increasing number of daily activities.”