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Are #Covid19 tracking programs an expansion of the surveillance state in public health disguise? A new @hrw publication examines key privacy & human rights concerns with global push to adopt contact tracing apps & other mobile tracking tech https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/13/covid-19-apps-pose-serious-human-rights-risks 1/
Mobile location data can contain sensitive & revealing insights about our identities, location, behavior & associations. Before handing it over to govs for contact tracing & quarantine enforcement we have to ask the basic questions: Will it work? And at what cost? #COVID19 2/
Already we've seen in South Korea, public health text message alerts based on the location history of known #COVID19 infected individuals led to people getting doxed and targeted with hate speech & harassment https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives 3/
In Israel, citing privacy concerns the Supreme Court ruled that the government must bring the expansive phone tracking program under legislation or end it. It's been renewed but considerable concerns remain about its legality & rights implications https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/10003 4/
In the cases of tech-driven #COVID19 responses we examined, we found govts tend to collect, use & retain data beyond what is necessary for legitimate & targeted disease surveillance w/o meaningful limits on data collection, retention, & use or transparency to evaluate them 5/
Will tech-driven solutions work? The truth is many of these data-intensive technologies being deployed are untested and unproven, and may in fact misrepresent an individual’s risk of infection or mislead the public #COVID19 6/
As @_alialkhatib points out, the exclusions of digital contact tracing will undermine their accuracy & the risks of acting on bad data - the result of excluding the poor, excluding older people, kids & high-risk groups - are unspeakably high 7/ https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/digital-contact-tracing
Over-reliance on mobile location tracking for #COVID19 responses could exclude marginalized people who don't have reliable access to the internet & mobile technology, putting their health and livelihoods at risk 8/ https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/25/closing-digital-divide-critical-covid-19-response
As my colleague @AmosToh puts it: Mobile tracking solutions create a two-tiered response to the pandemic that threatens to leave the poorest and most vulnerable people behind #COVID19 9/
We know that surveillance measures put in place during emergencies long outlast their initial justification. Nearly 20 years after 9/11, we're still fighting to end bulk collection of phone metadata by US intelligence agencies h/t @kianves https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/05/us-end-bulk-data-collection-program 10/
In sum, we seriously question whether #COVID19 tracking initiatives can meet international human rights standards (necessity & proportionality). If your govt is pursuing them, we developed guidelines to evaluate the human rights risks they pose https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/13/mobile-location-data-and-covid-19-qa 11/11
