Public health vs. personal privacy: Choose only one?

Public health vs. personal privacy: Choose only one?

As the world turns to technology to track and contain the COVID-19 pandemic, could this sound the death knell for digital privacy?



Health organizations and governments all over the world are using technology to communicate, track, monitor and predict the spread of COVID-19. In recent years, data has proven to be a valuable resource – more valuable than oil in some instances – and the use of data to understand the movement of people and their interactions to help control the spread of infection during a global pandemic seems like an excellent use of technology. There are likely to be very few people who would object to the use of technology to track an infected person to ensure they maintain quarantine; I may even advocate such use.


However, unprecedented times should not result in any long-term removal of our privacy rights, especially in cases where legislation has been rushed through to allow the fulfillment of medically urgent needs for data collection or use. In some instances, data is being extracted from smartphones on an individual basis or en masse. In the current age of COVID-19 concern, data potentially relevant to tracking the disease is being gathered, or there are proposals to gather it, via several mechanisms:


Custom apps developed to enable communication between health care professionals and patients, to keep people informed with official communications and to provide a warning if an individual has been in close proximity to someone testing positive. There are other use cases mentioned below.
Mobile phone companies are being asked, or already have, subscribers’ geotracking data, or already have, allowing the modeling of infection predictions based on actual phone subscribers’ movements.
Popular social media apps also track location, unless the member has elected not to share location data. There are public health personal privacy choose