If you have a smartphone, it’s likely that you’re being tracked, both by government entities and private organizations, to measure how U.S. residents are dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.
Location tracking can give government agencies and other groups a wealth of information about the coronavirus outbreak, including understanding whether people are complying with social distancing orders and understanding how the virus spreads.
But privacy advocates worry about government tracking, after news reports of many government agencies across the United States monitoring location data. Although agencies are apparently using anonymized location data, privacy advocates say it’s relatively easy to identify individual mobile phone users, and they also raise concerns that this use of location data opens the door to new government surveillance schemes.
Data can be de-anonymized, said Reid Blackman, a professional ethicist with Virtue Consultants and a former philosophy professor. “This is particularly easy when it comes to location data,” he said. “If, for instance, the person’s phone is always at a certain location by around 6 to 8 p.m. and doesn’t leave that location until sometime the next morning, you can be pretty sure that this phone’s owner lives at that location.”
It’s important that organizations tracking mobile phones for public health purposes consider the ethical implications, Blackman added. “There is certainly a concern that this tracking may be used for other, more destructive purposes,” he said. “From tracking someone’s phone, we can know where they go and with whom they associate.”
In some cases, health and other data gleaned from location tracking can fall into the hands of hackers and then be used to blackmail mobile phone users, he said. “We already see hackers blackmailing companies, threatening to release their data if they don’t pay up,” he said. “We can see the same thing happening with individuals’ data.”
In addition to apparent government tracking of location data, private companies are using it as well to study the coronavirus. In March, data analysis and collection company Unacast released a social distancing scoreboard, using mobile phone location data to rank state compliance with social distancing guidelines.
“We created this interactive Scoreboard, updated daily, to empower organizations to measure and understand the efficacy of social distancing initiatives at the local level,” the company wrote.
One of the problems with the coronavirus outbreak is that testing in the U.S. has been slow to develop, noted Brian McGinnis, a lawyer with the Indiana law firm Barnes & Thornburg.
“Without the ability to adequately track the disease’s spread, governments are looking towards alternative data sources to gain more information that could allow us to better fight this pandemic,” he said.
Over the past several years, mobile phones and apps have tracked and recorded a large variety of user information, including location. “Where the world is fighting the rapid spread of a global pandemic, some are looking for ways to use this data and other big data applications as a way to track infectious cases and, if possible, use that data to reduce the spread by anticipating outbreaks and hot spots,” McGinnis said.
Still, the privacy implications are “severe,” he added. “In my experience, the average person is far from fully aware of the detailed level of information their mobile devices can provide about them and their lives, and further, the way companies and marketers are already using and profiting from that information.”
David Kennedy, CEO of cybersecurity consulting firm TrustedSec, also raised concerns about the amount of data that mobile phones can collect.
“The larger issue to keep in mind here is that the mobile advertising industry, and third-party data collection in general, is very murky, so we don’t know a lot of the details,” he said. “These practices are not heavily scrutinized, and, in many cases, there is little to no information at all about how they work.”
It’s difficult to know how much data mobile phones are collecting and how it is linked to location data, he noted. “I expect these mobile advertisers have access to enough original data and cross-reference data to be able to identify individual people,” he said. “I would be surprised if that is not the case.”
If government agencies have access to a broad set of mobile phone data, they may also be able to identify individual users, he said.
However, public health is an important goal, Kennedy added. “Let’s all try to bear in mind here that we are facing an enormous public health crisis,” he added. “The government’s stated objective with this program is definitely well-intentioned and important right now for public safety. However, what does concern me is how such data could be abused down the road, months or years later, if the sharing continues.”
