Ethics and Reporting Practices for COVID-19:A living collection of resources, tip sheets, and guidance

Do We Need to Give Up Privacy to Fight the Coronavirus?

Will privacy be one of the victims of COVID-19? a dangerous debate has emerged on whether key tenets of European democracies, including the protection of the fundamental right to privacy, should be set aside during the pandemic to enable a more effective response.

This is not a new debate. Already in 52 BC, Cicero observed in his De Legibus that “salus publica suprema lex esto” (people’s well-being shall be the supreme law). When Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) and Robert Koch (1843–1910) started the bacteriological revolution in public healthcare, providing scientific backing for already-existing practices such as quarantine, sharp resistance emerged in many countries, based on the fear that the imposition of such measures would limit the freedom of movement of people and goods. The fights against tuberculosis and smallpox, and later HIV and Ebola, created tensions between the protection of public health and other fundamental rights, including personal privacy, over the course of more than a century. A similar compression of civil liberties is also seen in other fields, such as in the fight against terrorism.

In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provided that, in times of a public emergency threatening the life of a nation, the need to protect public health is a permissible ground for limiting certain rights, including the liberty of movement, freedom of expression and the right to freedom of association. In Europe, this possibility must be gauged against extremely high standards when it comes to privacy and data protection, with far-reaching provisions in EU Treaties, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the General Data Protection Regulation, which firmly established privacy as a fundamental right, and data ownership as belonging to individuals, not States. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights specifically mentions both the need to ensure protection of personal data (Articles 7-8) and “a high level of human health protection” (Article 35) in the definition and implementation of all Union policies and activities. Article 15 of the European Convention on Human Rights allows for derogations, provided that they are temporary, proportionate and strictly required by the exigencies of the situation. And the European Data Protection Supervisor has already clarified that measures that weaken the protection of the right to privacy should comply with both a necessity and a proportionality test.

But what is necessary, and what is proportionate in the face of such crisis?

Do We Need to Give Up Privacy to Fight the Coronavirus?  In today’s crisis, the focus is on using cellphone data—an unprecedented window into people’s movements—for disease surveillance.

Journalists around the world have been reporting on these efforts: Israel has authorized its security agency to tap into a trove of cellphone data to monitor people with the coronavirus. In Lombardy, Italy, the government is using cellphone data to keep track of whether people are disobeying the lockdown. China is requiring citizens to use an app that gives them a score—of red, yellow, or green—indicating whether they can move freely or must stay in quarantine. Singapore built an app that alerts users when they come into contact with an infected person.  

The U.S. government is in talks with tech companies, including Google and Facebook, about possibly using anonymized location data from Americans’ cellphones to track the spread of the coronavirus, according to The Washington Post. And the GSMA, an alliance of hundreds of global mobile phone operators, is exploring whether to build “a global data-sharing system that could track individuals around the world,” according to The Guardian. 

The hope that we can use technology to stop the spread of the coronavirus is understandable. But before racing headlong into massive surveillance, it’s worth pausing to remember what we have learned in the decades since we built the post 9/11 surveillance infrastructure: It’s very invasive, and it doesn’t necessarily work.

 

How Much Privacy Are You Entitled to During a Pandemic? According to U.S. government officials, privacy may be a necessary victim of the novel coronavirus. According to the Washington Post, federal officials have recently held conversations with an array of tech companies to discuss increased access to geolocation information taken from Americans’ smartphones. That’s highly personal information, showing who meets with whom and who goes where. Officials say they need the data to map the spread of the disease and determine if people are self-quarantining and that it will be kept anonymous and aggregated to protect privacy. But we should all be concerned about how that data could be used once the current pandemic has passed. [+]

 

US government officials using mobile ad location data to study coronavirus spread: The CDC could use the info to track compliance with stay-at-home orders

US government officials are using cellphone location data from the mobile ad industry —not data from the carriers themselves— to track Americans’ movements during the coronavirus outbreak, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with state and local governments have received cell phone data about people in areas of “geographic interest,” the WSJ reports. [+]

 

Más de 40 millones de teléfonos móviles serán usados para rastrear el coronavirus en toda España: Telefónica, Orange y Vodafone aportarán los datos de los usuarios aunque de forma anónima y agregada y no servirán para uso policial [UK telecom operators to share citizens’ location data with the government]

 

The Coronavirus Pandemic Has Set Off A Massive Expansion Of Government Surveillance. Civil Libertarians Aren't Sure What To Do. As nations around the world take on sweeping new powers to fight the disease, critics aren't sure what's necessary and what's too far.

 

European experts ready smartphone technology to help stop coronavirus: A group of European experts said on Wednesday they would soon launch technology for smartphones to help trace people who had come into contact with those infected with coronavirus, helping the health authorities act swiftly to halt its spread. ...

The European initiative, called Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT www.pepp-pt.org), follows the successful use of smartphones in some Asian countries to track the spread of the virus and enforce quarantine orders, although their methods would violate strict European data protection rules.

 

‘Dictatorships often start in the face of a threat’: UN privacy chief warns against long-lasting theft of freedoms amid coronavirus surveillance: ‘If you have a leader who wants to abuse the system, the system is there,’ Joseph Cannataci says

 

COVID-19: States should not abuse emergency measures to suppress human rights – UN experts

“Moreover, emergency declarations based on the Covid-19 outbreak should not be used as a basis to target particular groups, minorities, or individuals. It should not function as a cover for repressive action under the guise of protecting health nor should it be used to silence the work of human rights defenders.

“Restrictions taken to respond to the virus must be motivated by legitimate public health goals and should not be used simply to quash dissent.” 

Intelligence, Surveillance, and Ethics in a Pandemic: To battle the COVID-19 global pandemic, States are increasingly deploying intelligence and surveillance tools to monitor their populations in an attempt to stop the spread of the virus and limit its human and economic impacts. The use of these tools and techniques, once largely the purview of security, intelligence, and law enforcement, represents the extraordinary lengths that many States are taking to stop the infection. These efforts involve collecting data on citizens from cell phones, financial transactions, and social media intelligence, and combining it with health data, raising significant concerns about privacy and civil liberties. Parallels can be drawn between the global pandemic and the post-9/11 era, which saw significant broadening of state surveillance and intelligence powers around the world – powers that were never rolled back, and have instead became part of the fabric of the State intelligence and security apparatus. It is imperative that States and their citizens question how much freedom and privacy should be sacrificed to limit the impact of this pandemic.

 

Coronavirus is being used to suppress press freedoms globally: The coronavirus is providing cover to autocrats, dictators, and even some democratically-elected leaders who were already looking for reasons to undermine the independent media.

Driving the news: Recent examples show the press is being shut out by the government under the guise of stopping misinformation from spreading about the pandemic.

 

 

La carte des théories du complot sur le coronavirus: Depuis le début de l’année, les théories du complot, les rumeurs et les fake news sur le Covid-19 se sont propagées aussi vite que le virus.

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A better way? “Given that mitigation is unlikely to be a viable option without overwhelming healthcare systems, suppression is likely necessary in countries able to implement the intensive controls required,” says Ferguson. Suppression involves much tougher controls and compliance than mitigation.  

How China built facial recognition for people wearing masks

How China built facial recognition for people wearing masks: Hanwang, the facial-recognition company that has placed 2 million of its cameras at entrance gates across the world, started preparing for the coronavirus in early January.

Huang Lei, the company’s chief technical officer, said that even before the new virus was widely known about, he had begun to get requests from hospitals at the centre of the outbreak in Hubei province to update its software to recognise nurses wearing masks.

“We wouldn’t wait until something explodes to act. If three or five clients ask for the same thing . . . we’ll see that as important,” said Mr Huang, adding that its cameras previously only recognised people in masks half the time, compared with 99.5 percent accuracy for a full face image.

Since then, demand has soared, from police stations, railway stations and all the office towers that use Hanwang’s cameras to screen employees, and Mr Huang reassigned teams of people to work on the challenge.

The company now says its masked facial recognition program has reached 95 percent accuracy in lab tests, and even claims that it is more accurate in real life, where its cameras take multiple photos of a person if the first attempt to identify them fails.

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Yes, There Are Libertarians in Pandemics

Yes, There Are Libertarians in Pandemics: It's almost never a good idea to use a public health crisis to score points against your political opponents—and if you're going to do it, you really ought to try to describe the situation accurately.

Actually, that second part applies even when there's no public health crisis.

It has, however, become fashionable for certain elements of the Very Online Left to use the ongoing coronavirus outbreak as evidence that libertarians either don't actually exist or that we quickly abandon our principles in the face of a pandemic.

Coronavirus "infodemic" threatens world's health institutions

Tom Jefferson: Covid 19—many questions, no clear answers

Tom Jefferson: Covid 19—many questions, no clear answers: So I cannot answer my nagging doubts, there does not seem to be anything special about this particular epidemic of influenza-like illness.

There are, however, two consequences of this situation that bother me.

The first is the lack of institutional credibility as perceived by my friends. They range from firefighters, policemen, and even a GP—not the kind of people you would want to alienate in an emergency. A restaurant owner told me he would never report himself to the health authority as that would mean at least two weeks of closure and his business would go to the wall.  

Jokers and spoofers are doing overtime on the web. The authorities cried wolf in 2005 and 2009 with influenza and see what you get now.

The second is that once the limelight has moved on, will there be a serious and concentrated international effort to understand the causes and origins of influenza-like illnesses and the life cycle of its agents?

Past form tells me not, and we will go back to pushing influenza as a universal plague under the roof of the hot house of commercial interest. Note the difference: Influenza (caused by influenza A and B viruses, for which we have licensed vaccines and drugs), not influenza-like illnesses against which we should wash our hands all the year round, not just now.

Meanwhile, I still cannot answer Mario’s question: what’s different this time?