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| Joshua Roberts/Reuters |
Our laws have not caught up with the scope and digital-age intrusiveness of COVID-19 contact tracing.
Since the plague ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, fighting contagious and infectious disease has involved identifying those who come in close contact with infected persons, warning them of potential exposure, and advising they take precautions, such as monitoring for symptoms or self-isolation. To this day, many insist this process of “contact tracing” remains key to safely reopening America.
But COVID-19 is America’s first pandemic wholly of the digital age. When Swine flu began sweeping the globe a little over a decade ago, the iPhone was scarcely two years on the market and touch-screen Androids were unknown, the post-9/11 surveillance of Americans’ phone records was not yet revealed, and few had harnessed the tremendous power of personal data in marketing everything from consumer products to candidates.
Our thinking about the ancient practice of contact tracing needs to change with the times. Modern contact tracing presents more and different privacy and civil liberties concerns from, say, its pencil-and-paper ancestor during the 1918-19 Spanish Flu — and not only because of electronic tracking. Even data gathered the old-fashioned way by people making phone calls or knocking on doors to ask questions still present new digital-age challenges when compiled and potentially shared, manipulated, cross-referenced, and analyzed.
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The scale of COVID-19 contact tracing further compounds each of these concerns. One report concluded that combating this virus may require 100,000 contact tracers to gather information about Americans’ health status, movements, and associations. Many thousands already are busily at work.
Despite this, the government’s use of contact tracing — and the personal information it gathers — remains largely unregulated. COVID-19 requires a new 21st-century mindset: How do we stop the spread of the disease and protect privacy and civil liberties?Read the rest of the story HERE and follow links below to related stories and resources:
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