14 DAY TRIAL // Millions of Britons had their position tracked without their knowledge. According to a government report, the monitoring was done to see whether being vaccinated against COVID-19 made people more likely to spend time away from home.
According to the report, 10% of British mobile phone owners unwillingly participated in a study that used cell tower data to map approximate locations.
According to a study from the SPI-B committee of Government scientists, data from 1 out of every 10 people's phones was monitored in February without their owners' express knowledge.
Researchers at Oxford University used the statistics in studies for the Clinical Pandemic Influenza Community on Behaviours (SPI-B). The later advises the Sage group of Government scientific advisors.
When the scientists compared the movements of the vaccinated people to those of a separate control group, they discovered that their “average pre-vaccination mobility increased by 218 meters [sic]”.
Authorities didn't offer warranties that the data was anonymized
The government justified the move by claiming that user privacy was not jeopardized since the data was anonymized and the positions were estimated.
“The data is at cell tower rather than individual level and the researchers were granted access to the dataset under a research contract with ethical approval provided to the researchers from the University of Oxford, working on behalf of SPI-B”.
A Government source stated: “This analysis is at the cell tower level of anonymised data and is therefore not individual surveillance”.
Although positions derived from cell tower data are much less granular than GPS data, they can still be precise to within a thousand feet within cities. It should be noted that the claimed mobility difference is smaller than the resolution of the position data, and thus may be meaningless.
Even though the researchers may have received anonymous data, the company conducting the study may have held telephone numbers and the vaccine status. Affected users have no guarantees that their personal information was not shared at some point with the company that conducted the study.