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
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. [
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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.
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.
