Seiko Hashimoto, the President of the Toyko Olympics, has announced that foreign reporters attending the event will be tracked and managed via GPS and could have their passes revoked if they break the rules.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games were postponed due to the pandemic and are now due to open in just over six weeks.
Around 6,000 overseas journalists are expected to visit for the Olympics and will be forced to hand over a list of the places they’ll be visiting during their first two weeks in Japan. This list will then be used in conjunction with GPS tracking to regulate their movements and potentially dish out punishments.
“To make sure that people don’t go to places other than the places where they are registered to go, we will use GPS to strictly manage their behavior,” Hashimoto said before a Tokyo 2020 executive board meeting.
Reporters will also be urged to stay in designated hotels. The number of designated hotels has been slashed from the originally planned 350 to around 150 as part of the organizer’s efforts to keep visitors under close supervision.
Additionally, the movements of Olympic athletes will also be restricted and they’ll be required to take daily COVID-19 tests.
This mandatory GPS tracking is the latest illustration of how pervasive invasive tracking tech has become since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
As with most of the tracking tech that has been implemented, this GPS tracking system not only forces people to give up their privacy but also restricts their freedom of movement.
Numerous countries have pushed through similar measures during the pandemic via secret surveillance or vaccine passports.
Concerns about the impact on privacy and civil liberties have been rising as the tech rolls out with people being denied access to grocery stores and having their privacy compromised because of this technology.
Professors have also urged the world to learn from Israel’s vaccine passport system and said that these passes are “irreconcilable with basic principles of the medical profession.”
