Policy for Pandemics 05: Should We Give Up Our Privacy for Public Health?
How governments are using our data and tracking us to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged global policy makers in ways unheard of in most of our lifetimes. This newsletter will attempt to provide short, accessible briefings on as many of the relevant policy challenges as possible. This briefing is written by Charlotte Reboul (CR), a graduate student at the Max Bell School of Public Policy who is riding out the pandemic in Montreal.
Surveillance, Privacy & the Pandemic
To contain COVID-19, governments and companies worldwide are leveraging new technologies and digital surveillance tools to track down infected individuals and the people they may have been in contact with.
In Israel, data secretly gathered by the government to combat terrorism is now being used to identify people at risk of having contracted the virus. Italy is using location tracing to determine if individuals are respecting the stringent lockdown policies. Singapore has published the health status and data of infected individuals online.
Perhaps the most intrusive use of surveillance is in South Korea and China where surveillance-camera footage and facial recognition technologies are used to identify individuals, track their movement and even take their temperature remotely. In addition to cellphone data tracing, China is ramping up compliance technology to identify individuals wearing masks.
If desperate times call for desperate measures, it’s also true that policies introduced during a crisis tend to be sticky. So, it is worth asking: where do we draw the line? How can we ensure that we are not allowing wide-scale, systematic privacy violations when the crisis recedes? How can we ensure that the data collected is really being used for the public good (and only the public good)?
Our collective future might indeed look very different from our past. It’s not hard to envision a world where our steps and vital signs are tracked before being permitted into a restaurant for dinner, taking a flight or stepping into a classroom. A post-crisis world could require providing proof of health before being allowed at work or being considered for a job interview.
The real issue is that this heightened surveillance will not affect everyone the same. The poorest and most disfranchised segments of the populations who are more vulnerable to falling sick in the first place or unable to seek treatment will be more often denied access to services and opportunities. The long-term implications of surveillance tools such as facial recognition technologies remain poorly understood and proof of their questionable accuracy and inherent biases against visible minorities is mounting.
Perhaps no other context better demonstrates the fundamental human rights threats of intrusive surveillance technologies and poor data privacy protection than China. Reports have concluded that the government of China is using a combination of technologies to identify, monitor and police people’s lawful behaviour, leading to the mass arbitrary detention of more than a million Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.
If we are still a long way from China’s situation, many western governments have declared the state of emergency in the wake of the pandemic, allowing them to pass policies hastily. Our new normal lacks the usual level of checks and balances typical of democracies, which should worry all of us. In Israel, hundreds of people demonstrated outside the parliament to denounce President Netanyahu’s for using his coronavirus response as a cover to further his undemocratic agenda. As more spheres of our lives — be they political, economic or social — transition to the digital world, we run the risk of having our privacy dictated by the limit of technocrats’ imagination.
The use of personal data by governments and corporations always poses a trade-off between public safety and personal privacy. It seems reasonable to shift where we stand on that trade-off during this time of policy exceptionalism, but we can’t lose focus on what we are giving up.
Governments are acting unilaterally and rather blindly at the moment, but there might be other promising ways to ensure individual’s privacy and consent are respected in our fight against this deadly virus. Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the Mayo Clinic have proposed a voluntary geo-locator app that notifies users if they cross paths with someone infected. This tool could effectively automate contact-tracing without invading individual privacy, as data is anonymized, and the healthy user’s data never leaves their phone.
Adding user consent around data sharing is in line with “gold standard” data privacy frameworks such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Under the GDPR, the collection, use and disclosure of data is restricted to protect data subjects’ rights and requires explicit and informed consent. Governments should also require researchers developing these tools to provide users with the rights to access, erase and move their data.
Crucially, governments and companies alike must be transparent about their use and disclosure of data, even in this time of heightened tension. If hastily implemented policies are not sunsetted, our freedom of movement will not be the only thing COVID-19 will have deprived us of. (CR)
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Policy for Pandemics is produced and edited by Andrew Potter. associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy. The co-editors are Paisley Sim and Charlotte Reboul, graduate students at Max Bell. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute to this newsletter, please send an email to andrew2.potter@mcgill.ca