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A new study analyzing COVID-19 contact tracing apps conducted by Amnesty International has found that Bahrain and Kuwait are using their public health apps as mass surveillance tools.
The study analyzed a collection of contact tracing apps, which are designed to inform and monitor physical contact between people in the event someone contracts COVID-19, from 11 countries: Algeria, Bahrain, France, Iceland, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Norway, Qatar, Tunisia, and United Arab Emirates. It found three particularly egregious apps that collected satellite location data from users, instead of relying simply on Bluetooth signals, and matched accounts with real identities.
In one extreme case, some citizens who downloaded the BeAware Bahrain…