Compulsory selfies and contact-tracing: Authorities everywhere are using smartphones to track the coronavirus, and it's part of a massive increase in global surveillance

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• As coronavirus sweeps across the globe, governments are stepping up surveillance.
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• A new index from digital rights group Top10VPN documents which countries are introducing new measures to track people's phones.
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• Some countries are collecting anonymized data to study the movement of people more generally, while others are providing detailed information about individuals' movements.
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• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Governments across the world are availing every surveillance tool at their disposal to help stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Countries have been quick to use the one tool almost all of us carry with us: our smartphones. Governments are also receiving support from private tech companies. Google and Apple announced in April they were working together to develop an API which could be used by countries' health authorities in order to build coronavirus-tracking apps.

A live index of ramped up security measures by Top10VPN details the countries which have already brought in measures to track the phones of coronavirus patients, ranging from anonymized aggregated data to monitor the movement of people more generally, to the tracking of individual suspected patients and their contacts, known as contact tracing.

Samuel Woodhams, Top10VPN's Digital Rights Lead who compiled the index, warned that the world could slide into permanently increased surveillance.

"Without adequate tracking, there is a danger that these new, often highly invasive, measures will become the norm around the world," he told Business Insider. "Although some may appear entirely legitimate, many pose a risk to citizens' right to privacy and freedom of expression.

"Given how quickly things are changing, documenting the new measures is the first step to challenging potential overreach, providing scrutiny and holding corporations and governments to account."

While some countries will cap their new emergency measures, otherwise may retain the powers for future use. "There is a risk that many of these new capabilities will continue to be used following the outbreak," Woodhams said. "This is particularly significant as many of the new measures have avoided public and political scrutiny and do not include sunset clauses."

Here's a breakdown of which countries have started tracking phone data, with varying degrees of invasiveness: