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In practice, its deployments look like this: Oakland University will give students devices that will measure their temperature over 1,400 times a day, while members of University of Tennessee’s football team are already wearing proximity trackers under their gear that record if any of them spend more than 15 minutes close to another player.

Meanwhile in Texas, those working for Rent-A-Center now wear proximity detectors. These are making logs of contacts between employees, and, as the article phrased it, this data “can be used to alert them to possible virus exposure.”

But privacy and rights advocates think that introducing this sort of device means that large portions of the population might, in effect, end up under complete and constant surveillance: online by the likes of Google and Facebook, and physically through this type of around-the-clock monitoring.

Law enforcement will be able to demand that data gathered this way be turned over to them, warned Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s Executive Director Fox Cahn.

“It’s chilling that these invasive and unproven devices could become a condition for keeping our jobs, attending school or taking part in public life,” Cahn commented.