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DemocracyWatch: COVID-19 ushers in a new era of surveillance apps

Around the world, governments are using the crisis to roll back democracy and human rights – and to monitor citizens through new tracker apps.

By Adam Ramsay
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In 2009, PayPal founder and major Facebook investor Peter Thiel wrote a notorious essay. He argued that allowing women to vote had made democracy untenable and that someone should therefore invent the technology to stop it.

These days, Thiel, a Trump supporter, is founder-chairman of Palantir. Named after a magic all-seeing stone in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, it’s a data-analytics firm set up with help from the US Department of Defense. Last week, Palantir got the US government contract to run a new system for tracking the spread of COVID-19.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0