Surveilling the Sick: Technology and the COVID-19 Pandemic
April 21, 2019
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of life. As we are in the midst of the worst pandemic in modern times, the use of technology in order to track citizens has become not just a key method in controlling the spread of the virus, but also has attracted increasing scrutiny about the nature of surveillance. On one hand, it鈥檚 vital to be able to track who is not adhering to quarantine, where infected persons are traveling, to be able to receive alerts about new cases in an area, and even to prove that one isn鈥檛 a transmission risk. However, growing concerns point to apps not working properly, how much information needs to be shared with the general population, and how these tracing measures can and will be used once the pandemic is over. During this crucial time, the expansion of technology-based tracking measures to control the pandemic and privacy if left unchecked.
Countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan in order to control the scope and spread of the pandemic in their respective countries. Now other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and others are planning on doing the same. is meant to not only let others know that they have come into contact with an infected person, but also to help ensure safe and effective quarantines. By using smartphone data, much of the guesswork of trying to determine where a person went, what time they were present, and how long they were there. Since human memory , these kinds of data are essential to help stop the spread of disease.
However, the slew of ethical concerns about what kind of data to collect and what information to release to the public are only mounting as the pandemic worsens in many parts of the world. release information about the infected person鈥檚 age, gender, neighborhood of residence, when and where they took public transportation, and the names of businesses or other areas they may have visited. South Korea鈥檚 system not only sends out alerts, but created with patient data that are then sent to everybody within a 5km radius. There have been cases, though, where enough information was released about someone that made them identifiable . These exposures and their subsequent attacks , which may prevent people from seeking treatment or being forthcoming about their status, further worsening the pandemic.
Even more, as being locations that were visited by someone who was confirmed positive have seen a loss in customers. In general, despite the large amounts of information being provided, people seem to be demanding more information about people who have tested positive. Currently, all of the information that is disclosed and access to data is given voluntarily by patients. However, as the pandemic worsens, this voluntary surrender of data may become a thing of the past.
Crisis and Opportunity
This is not the first time that a crisis has been the key event that triggered mass surveillance measures of a population. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, under the guise that it was meant to provide resources to fight terrorists. This was far from the truth. Rather, and reduced the checks and balances in place to control this power. In 2013, revealed to the world that the U.S. government had been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, as well giving the government unprecedented authority to access computer records and credit and banking history.
Using the fear of the possibility of another terrorist attack, the U.S. government had justified their actions for years after the 9/11 attacks by turning In the era of COVID-19, a disease that can be spread by even asymptomatic carriers, everyone is potentially infected. and threats to the are mounting as the crisis worsens. This fear, and its associated crisis, is an opportunity for governments to expand these surveillance powers and their authority to collect this data about its citizens. Organizations, researchers, and legal experts are calling for uses of these public health initiatives like contact tracing . Countries that were already using technology to surveill certain people () are merely expanding these in-place measures for everybody else or using the crisis to expand even more authoritarian surveillance measures.
Currently, developing methods or alreadt starting to to track people鈥檚 movements via information provided by cell phones. Even in the United States, the is using similar kinds of data to give states letter grades on how well they are social distancing. This highlights the key tension here: the kind of data needed for mass surveillance and control of a population is already readily available and accessible, and doesn鈥檛 need to be voluntarily surrendered or disclosed by citizens. Rather than being seen as a 鈥渃ute鈥� project, the social distancing scoreboard should alert people to the amount of information already available and being collected about their movements.
Divides in Access, Privacy, and Ethics
In the United States, to build a contact tracking system that is not built off of GPS, but rather Bluetooth technology. Although Google and Apple maintain that they will not be 鈥渃reating鈥� the apps so much as providing instruction and guidance to governments to do so themselves, and that the data won鈥檛 be shared, the two tech giants spearheading the contact tracing initiative in the United States should be cause for alarm. Apple and Google to not just information about people from their devices, but from their browsers, searches, GPS systems, all of the apps that they use, and even their health data. Further, the utility and efficiency of app-based contact tracing measures is still unknown. However, we can predict how efficient they will be due to knowing the already existing limitations of the technology itself: and doesn鈥檛 necessarily measure distance accurately. This means that people may be alerted that they may have come into contact with a tested positive person, but they may have been nearly 20 feet away, meaning that transmission is unlikely. Further, the issue is not even just about the data collection, but the fact that because of limitations of their devices or laws prohibiting the use of Google services.
Although apps will help ease the burden, manual contact tracing will still be more accurate than app-based approaches. These app-based measures not only highlight privacy concerns, but highlight issues regarding the digital divide. But manual contact tracing may become impossible if the pandemic continues to worsen, and at the rate that it is going, we may be facing a future of providing us information about the rate of transmission and exposure. People will need to fight in order to ensure that the only data being collected for contact tracing measures are data that are useful from a public health standpoint and that . This transparency also extends to how data is being collected and stored, and with what agencies and organizations it is being shared.
Rather than applying technodeterministic lenses on the use of technology during a pandemic, to help stop the spread will be crucial in preventing the use of these technologies long after the pandemic for surveilling citizens. Governments will most likely be reluctant to give up this level of access to citizen data, and although even I can understand and accept the utility of technology-based methods, I am wary of the potential for this access and authority The world will never be the same, but how it will change is still uncertain. We will either emerge from this crisis with our privacy protections intact, or will exist in a world where we will have embraced the .
April 21, 2019
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted every aspect of life. As we are in the midst of the worst pandemic in modern times, the use of technology in order to track citizens has become not just a key method in controlling the spread of the virus, but also has attracted increasing scrutiny about the nature of surveillance. On one hand, it鈥檚 vital to be able to track who is not adhering to quarantine, where infected persons are traveling, to be able to receive alerts about new cases in an area, and even to prove that one isn鈥檛 a transmission risk. However, growing concerns point to apps not working properly, how much information needs to be shared with the general population, and how these tracing measures can and will be used once the pandemic is over. During this crucial time, the expansion of technology-based tracking measures to control the pandemic and privacy if left unchecked.
Countries like China, South Korea, and Taiwan in order to control the scope and spread of the pandemic in their respective countries. Now other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and others are planning on doing the same. is meant to not only let others know that they have come into contact with an infected person, but also to help ensure safe and effective quarantines. By using smartphone data, much of the guesswork of trying to determine where a person went, what time they were present, and how long they were there. Since human memory , these kinds of data are essential to help stop the spread of disease.
However, the slew of ethical concerns about what kind of data to collect and what information to release to the public are only mounting as the pandemic worsens in many parts of the world. release information about the infected person鈥檚 age, gender, neighborhood of residence, when and where they took public transportation, and the names of businesses or other areas they may have visited. South Korea鈥檚 system not only sends out alerts, but created with patient data that are then sent to everybody within a 5km radius. There have been cases, though, where enough information was released about someone that made them identifiable . These exposures and their subsequent attacks , which may prevent people from seeking treatment or being forthcoming about their status, further worsening the pandemic.
Even more, as being locations that were visited by someone who was confirmed positive have seen a loss in customers. In general, despite the large amounts of information being provided, people seem to be demanding more information about people who have tested positive. Currently, all of the information that is disclosed and access to data is given voluntarily by patients. However, as the pandemic worsens, this voluntary surrender of data may become a thing of the past.
Crisis and Opportunity
This is not the first time that a crisis has been the key event that triggered mass surveillance measures of a population. In response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, under the guise that it was meant to provide resources to fight terrorists. This was far from the truth. Rather, and reduced the checks and balances in place to control this power. In 2013, revealed to the world that the U.S. government had been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans, as well giving the government unprecedented authority to access computer records and credit and banking history.
Using the fear of the possibility of another terrorist attack, the U.S. government had justified their actions for years after the 9/11 attacks by turning In the era of COVID-19, a disease that can be spread by even asymptomatic carriers, everyone is potentially infected. and threats to the are mounting as the crisis worsens. This fear, and its associated crisis, is an opportunity for governments to expand these surveillance powers and their authority to collect this data about its citizens. Organizations, researchers, and legal experts are calling for uses of these public health initiatives like contact tracing . Countries that were already using technology to surveill certain people () are merely expanding these in-place measures for everybody else or using the crisis to expand even more authoritarian surveillance measures.
Currently, developing methods or alreadt starting to to track people鈥檚 movements via information provided by cell phones. Even in the United States, the is using similar kinds of data to give states letter grades on how well they are social distancing. This highlights the key tension here: the kind of data needed for mass surveillance and control of a population is already readily available and accessible, and doesn鈥檛 need to be voluntarily surrendered or disclosed by citizens. Rather than being seen as a 鈥渃ute鈥� project, the social distancing scoreboard should alert people to the amount of information already available and being collected about their movements.
Divides in Access, Privacy, and Ethics
In the United States, to build a contact tracking system that is not built off of GPS, but rather Bluetooth technology. Although Google and Apple maintain that they will not be 鈥渃reating鈥� the apps so much as providing instruction and guidance to governments to do so themselves, and that the data won鈥檛 be shared, the two tech giants spearheading the contact tracing initiative in the United States should be cause for alarm. Apple and Google to not just information about people from their devices, but from their browsers, searches, GPS systems, all of the apps that they use, and even their health data. Further, the utility and efficiency of app-based contact tracing measures is still unknown. However, we can predict how efficient they will be due to knowing the already existing limitations of the technology itself: and doesn鈥檛 necessarily measure distance accurately. This means that people may be alerted that they may have come into contact with a tested positive person, but they may have been nearly 20 feet away, meaning that transmission is unlikely. Further, the issue is not even just about the data collection, but the fact that because of limitations of their devices or laws prohibiting the use of Google services.
Although apps will help ease the burden, manual contact tracing will still be more accurate than app-based approaches. These app-based measures not only highlight privacy concerns, but highlight issues regarding the digital divide. But manual contact tracing may become impossible if the pandemic continues to worsen, and at the rate that it is going, we may be facing a future of providing us information about the rate of transmission and exposure. People will need to fight in order to ensure that the only data being collected for contact tracing measures are data that are useful from a public health standpoint and that . This transparency also extends to how data is being collected and stored, and with what agencies and organizations it is being shared.
Rather than applying technodeterministic lenses on the use of technology during a pandemic, to help stop the spread will be crucial in preventing the use of these technologies long after the pandemic for surveilling citizens. Governments will most likely be reluctant to give up this level of access to citizen data, and although even I can understand and accept the utility of technology-based methods, I am wary of the potential for this access and authority The world will never be the same, but how it will change is still uncertain. We will either emerge from this crisis with our privacy protections intact, or will exist in a world where we will have embraced the .