House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy sought Thursday to allay privacy concerns surrounding proposals to use mobile technology to trace people who are believed to have the coronavirus.
“I think every American is on board with the idea they want to protect their freedoms. There’s also opportunities here to use technology,” the California Republican told reporters during his weekly press briefing. “But contact tracing means somebody has the virus. Who have you seen before? Who can we warn ahead of time to get tested? Who can sit back and quarantine themselves for 14 days?”
He added, “There are many different ways to do it. There are ways that individuals can opt in if we want to use technology to notify others. I want to make sure we keep our freedom and at the same time keep our health, and there’s a way to provide both of them.”
Contact tracing is a process of finding people with whom an individual with an infectious disease had contact. Google and Apple put forth a proposal for COVID-19 contact tracing by using cellphone signals from over 3 billion mobile devices, Wired reported.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and President Trump’s task force physicians, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, have all supported the idea of ramping up contact tracing methods around the country in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Rep. Andrew Biggs, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, called the idea an invasion of privacy. Biggs told Seth Leibsohn’s radio show Tuesday that “the media has engendered hysteria. Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx have engendered panic. And then, you move to this really weird dynamic where Dr. Fauci is now advocating for what he’s calling ‘contact tracing,’ where they want to be able to monitor you, everyone, always, and move to the national ID-type of test system and give you a certificate, as you regularly test, that says, ‘I am immune,’ or something like that.”
The Arizona Republican added: “This type of centralization of spying on American people — that’s not freedom. That is enslavement. That is totalitarianism, and that’s what you see when you get a big crisis like what we had that has been manipulated, in some ways, to produce hopes for authoritarian outcome.”
McCarthy, however, says that the process is necessary to stop the spread of the virus and that personal freedoms can be maintained simultaneously.
“I understand what Andy is saying and what Andy wants to make sure doesn’t happen. I think almost all Americans want to make sure they keep their freedoms, and we can do that, but what’s going to happen as we open this country back up, as we continue to work on antibodies, as we get to successes, as we continue to work on the vaccines, there will become hot spots,” he said. “But how do we deal with it quickly? How do we make sure it doesn’t blow? And that’s what you do with tracing. And there’s ways to do it. From technology, there’s ways to do it.”