In an unprecedented collaboration, tech giants Apple and Google announced last week that they’ve joined forces to help combat the coronavirus.
The companies are producing a robust individual contact tracing tool that will alert users if they came in contact with someone who has tested positive for the coronavirus. Of course, policymakers and media commentators alike are already sounding the alarm on privacy considerations with this new technology. Legitimate concerns should certainly be addressed, but fear shouldn’t stop people from giving this app a chance.
This new innovation could very well give some relief to an overwhelmed public health system while keeping our private information out of the government’s reach.
Available on both Android and iOS devices, this tool will deploy a short-range Bluetooth technology that will allow your phone to collect encrypted information about who came in contact with you. This will stay anonymous, but if someone reports that they’ve tested positive for the coronavirus, anyone who has come in contact with that person will be informed.
Thankfully, an additional layer of security will be in place, ensuring that the identities of people who test positive won’t be known to other users or even to the companies themselves. Even better, this app is opt-in only, which means that users must give their explicit consent to participate and share their sensitive information. And that information will be rather safely guarded, since there will be encryption, which will hopefully thwart hacking efforts.
We’re still in the middle of the lockdown, and no one is certain when America can safely reopen. But, whenever we do, this tool will be crucial in keeping the second wave of community transmission under control. If these private companies didn’t step up, sooner or later, the government would’ve come up with its own surveillance apparatus, and the government’s record on protecting civil liberties while conducting surveillance is certainly very poor. So, then, this collaboration with Apple and Google is a much better alternative.
Governments around the world have already been actively collecting an enormous amount of data on their citizens with little to no concern for privacy.
In Israel, for example, authorities locate those who have tested positive and enforce a two-week quarantine by monitoring their geolocation data. Poland uses a smartphone app called Home Quarantine that reports geolocation and facial recognition data and even requires its users to send selfies to the government to prove they’re home. Meanwhile, South Korea gathers GPS tracking, credit card records, and surveillance video data, even publishing the locations of infected citizens on a government website.
And while some may argue such drastic measures might be necessary in such desperate times as these, it’s highly unlikely the U.S. government would scale back these expansions of its power once everything subsides. After all, the United States has a very concerning history when it comes to limiting and sunsetting surveillance authorities and programs that it implements.
Following 9/11, for instance, the U.S. government passed laws that violated constitutional privacy rights, and we’re still reforming them. Just last month, Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz made the astonishing disclosure that FBI records were insufficient to support the foreign intelligence surveillance applications that were granted.
Surveillance is a very bad dinner guest, and it always hangs around way too long.
Unfortunately, it looks like the federal government is about to try its own expanded surveillance state on for size. News reports say that Jared Kushner’s team is looking into creating a national coronavirus surveillance team. But, as policymakers in the U.S. develop the infrastructure for the next steps in fighting the pandemic and resuscitating the economy, there are a few civil liberty principles that must be codified first.
First and foremost, we are entitled to transparency.
In the post-9/11 era, we were at war with a country or a certain group of people, and secrets were important to keep. Now, we’re at war with a virus. Complete transparency surrounding the new mechanism of data collection that will be put in place is vital.
Second, there must be a firewall surrounding who has access to the data. And law enforcement agencies shouldn’t have any access, since there’s no reason for them to get their hands on this information.
Third, a sunset provision should be an essential part of any regulation or law that would authorize the data collection. We’re going to win the battle against the coronavirus eventually, and the surveillance tools used to fight it must be dismantled after the fact.
The fourth element to protect privacy is to establish clear guidelines on why certain data is being collected and how it helps in the fight against the pandemic.
Finally, there should be strict data retention requirements. Data that are not needed anymore should be deleted. However, public health officials and researchers can determine the anonymous information they’ll need for their research and to prevent future pandemics.
As we grapple with this historic challenge and decide what kind of role we can allow surveillance to have in our lives, one thing is certain: We simply can’t afford to get the balance of privacy and public health wrong — far too much is at stake.
Ashkhen Kazaryan is the director of civil liberties at TechFreedom and a Young Voices contributor.
