Big Brother: Millions Secretly Tracked to Monitor Movements After COVID Vaccine

BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 31: Protesters hold flags and banners during an anti-lockdow
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Kurt Zindulka

The British government has been reported to have secretly surveilled the movements of millions of citizens to track changes in behaviour following the administration of coronavirus vaccines.

A report from the SPI-B committee of government scientists has revealed that the government tracked up to ten per cent of the British public’s phones in February, all without permission or notification to the public.

The report, which was seen by the Sunday Telegraph, said that researchers at Oxford University for the SPI-B — a subgroup of the British government’s SAGE quango — monitored the behavioural changes of vaccinated Britons through “CDR [call data records] with corresponding location observations”.

Through tracking “cell phone mobility data for 10 per cent of the British population”, the Oxford University team was able to determine that 4,254 people had received a coronavirus vaccine at the time.

Researchers went to track those individuals through forty “CDR [call data records] with corresponding location observations” daily. They studied the changes in the behaviour of those vaccinated by comparing the week before and the week after the administering of the jab.

The report revealed that “various robustness checks are undertaken by age, distance from home to vaccination point” by the government group, which also studied “gyration (radius of gyration on vaccination day), time (opening hours) and home (do they go home directly after vaccination)”.

Through the behavioural monitoring of vaccinated people compared to a control group, the researchers were able to determine that “average pre-vaccination mobility increased by 218 meters”.

Silkie Carlo, the director of the civil liberties pressure group Big Brother Watch said in response to the report: “No one expects that by going to get a vaccine they will be tracked and monitored by their own Government.

“This is deeply chilling and could be extremely damaging to public trust in medical confidentiality.

“Between looming Covid passports and vaccine phone surveillance, this Government is turning Britain into a Big Brother state under the cover of Covid. This should be a wake-up call to us all.”

A government spokesman defended the programme, claiming that the mobile phone data was “collected, cleaned, and anonymized” before being provided to the government researchers.

“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,” the spokesman claimed.

A source within the government also told the paper that the type of surveillance carried out was not the same as the sort of GPS tracking data which is commonly used by commercial companies for advertising purposes.

“This data is incidental and automatically generated when people use their mobile phones and is part of the general terms and conditions,” the source said.

“Users are given a new token of identification each month to preserve anonymity and the only basic demographic data that is shared is age within a two-year bracket and self-reported sex,” they added.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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