Operators will soon deliver geolocation data to the Commission

The European Commission should receive “in the next few days” from several telecom operators anonymized geolocation data in order to anticipate the spikes in the spread of the coronavirus epidemic, a source told the Commission on Wednesday. The European Commissioner responsible for the internal market, Thierry Breton, met on Monday with the bosses of several large European operators.

Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Vodafone said they were ready to share this metadata, it was added from the same source. It’s a city-wide comparison of day trips with night trips. This “anonymized and aggregated” metadata is to be used at JRC, the Commission’s scientific study center which works on algorithms to analyze the spread of the virus.

Storage conditions respected

This type of data is already used in several Member States. In France, Orange is working with the French Institute for Medical Research (Inserm) to better monitor population movements during the pandemic.

The goal is to help hospitals to prepare and anticipate equipment needs, the source explains to the Commission, which adds that these data are intended to be destroyed at the end of the epidemic. According to this source, their use complies with the ePrivacy directive, the storage conditions meet the European Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the European data protection supervisor has been consulted.

MEP worried

“It has nothing to do with what could have been put in place in South Korea or Singapore to track respect for containment,” said the same source. “It is by no means about trying to trace the movement of people individually.” But for Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld (Renew), who wrote a letter to Thierry Breton asking for a number of clarifications, “in practice it is very difficult to anonymize” the data.

“I would like to know what method they are going to use, and what they are going to do to protect privacy,” she said. “You have to be careful. I wouldn’t want to wake up one day to realize that the safeguards of democracy and the rule of law in the EU have disappeared. ”

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