Unacast is just another example of how technology is being deployed as mass surveillance tools to combat the virus.

Several other examples of companies and governments extracting data from citizens for surveillance purposes to support quarantines have been though monitoring social media posts and facial recognition databases.

Ghost Data, a big data analysis firm, collected half a million Instagram posts in March, mainly from hard-hit virus regions in Italy that are in lockdown. The company was able to run facial recognition software on all images to identify people who were violating the country’s quarantine orders.

Another technology company that has joined the effort to support big governments in their quest to enforce full lockdowns with high-tech tools is telecommunications firm Vodafone. The company is giving European governments heat maps of location data, to track mass gatherings.

The World Health Organization has widely supported the actions by governments to tap technology companies to unleash mass surveillance programs to fight the virus. Monitoring the populace through invasive technology tools will erode whatever freedoms people of the West have left and risk ushering in a more permeant dystopian surveillance system like China’s.