Wall Street Journal reveals how tech firms spying is considered sacrosanct in a pandemic by governments

A surveillance economy has proliferated thriving on the data for targeting ads at individuals, including their location information. These data are collected by location-tracking firms, data brokers, and other middlemen who sell it to the ad-tech industry.

Location information of individuals is prone to surveillance by law enforcement agencies or political groups. Privacy advocates raise the issue of restriction of the right to freedom and privacy under these circumstances. But, as the Wall Street Journal reveals, that with the pandemic public-health authorities are setting aside these concerns.

Authorities are bent towards accumulating data to identify people who might be infected with the virus. This is giving data-collection companies a chance to revive their battered image.

In this background, many tech-firms are proffering. Many law-enforcement agencies and public-health authorities have aligned with these tech-firms to monitor the pandemic. In New York City and other cities, officials have established a Pandemic Management Platform, which integrates tech-firms data to display aggregated information about population movements in the city.