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Can we track the pandemic while protecting privacy? THREAD: https://www.justsecurity.org/69549/can-governments-track-the-pandemic-and-still-protect-privacy/
Governments around the world are trying out new digital surveillance tools in efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19. (E.g., China, England, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, United States.) 1/x https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/technology/coronavirus-surveillance-tracking-privacy.html
Which raises lots of questions: Are these tools necessary to protect public health (or even effective)? Who has access to the location, contact, and/or health data collected? How is the data used/stored? When, if ever, is the data deleted? 2/x
One European proposal at least gestures toward the right answers. 3/x https://www.pepp-pt.org/content
The proposed tool would assign smartphones anonymous IDs; locally record the IDs of other smartphones that come within contagion range; and delete those IDs after the 2-week contagion period. 4/x
Someone who contracts COVID-19 could voluntarily deliver the connection data recorded on their phones to health authorities, who could then alert people who may have been exposed to the virus and direct them to self-quarantine. 5/x
We need more details, but at a high level, this proposal seems promising—or better than others, anyway—for a few reasons. 6/x
First, encrypted, anonymized data is locally stored for a limited period of time. 7/x
Second, people voluntarily provide that data to health authorities. 8/x
Third, the tool collects connection data—not location data. Connection data reveals info most relevant for determining who may have been exposed to the virus. Location data reveals much more irrelevant info about a person, at least for contact-tracing purposes. 9/x
(So, unlike tools in use by, e.g., China, this tool does not funnel personally identified health and location info into centralized servers for police or other government officials to use for any number of other purposes now or in the future.) 10/x
While more questions remain to be answered, the European proposal seems to be a more privacy-protective alternative to those put forward by the surveillance-tech industry and governmental authorities, many of which view mass surveillance as manifest destiny. @knightcolumbia 11/x
We should rely on public health experts to articulate the need for surveillance to limit the spread of COVID-19, and on privacy experts to ensure that surveillance is no broader than necessary and subject to appropriate oversight. @amnesty @EFF @privacyint @JayCStanley 12/12
