Yuval Noah Harari: Covid-19 may bring new surveillance era

The coronavirus pandemic could prove to be a watershed event in terms of enabling greater surveillance of society, the historian Yuval Noah Harari has said.

He told Hardtalk's Stephen Sackur: "People could look back in 100 years and identify the coronavirus epidemic as the moment when a new regime of surveillance took over, especially surveillance under the skin which I think is maybe the most important development of the 21st Century, is this ability to hack human beings."

Biometric data would create a system that knew human beings better than they knew themselves, he added.

Watch the full interview on Tuesday 28 April 2020 on BBC World News and the BBC News Channel or watch again on BBC iPlayer (UK only).