The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a debate about how to balance individual privacy and public health. To contain the spread of the virus, governments deployed mobile apps for tracking and reporting individuals’ locations, symptoms, and even credit card transactions, often outsourcing their development to private tech companies like Apple or Google. While these apps have been presented as necessary technical tools for the pandemic response, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the involvement of tech giants that typically derive their profits from consumer data, the access of governments to citizens’ personal information, and the proliferation of surveillance methods.
In some cases, these concerns have been realized. For example, in Singapore, despite the government’s claims that users’ private data was used solely for COVID-19 contact tracing, it was soon revealed that the Singapore police had unregulated access to the geolocation data of users collected through three major contact tracing apps. In countries like Taiwan and Poland, on the other hand, these apps have become integral to a coercively enforced system of governance. In Taiwan, the government implemented “electric fences” through the app, which alerts the police if the patients leave their houses or switch off their phones. The police regularly visit people’s homes to prevent people from deceiving the system by leaving their phones behind before going outside. On the other hand, Poland’s COVID tracing app obliges patients to take regular selfies to prove that they are quarantined at home. If individuals fail to respond to a request for a selfie within 20 minutes, the police are notified.
Proponents of digital tracing tools believe that these problems can be avoided with a voluntary-adoption policy and a privacy-preserving design. In most democratic countries, COVID tracing apps use Bluetooth wireless signals to trace contact: If a person using the app voluntarily logs in a positive COVID test result, other app users who have been in proximity long enough to risk being infected are asked to self-isolate as a precaution. Individuals don’t know who might have exposed them to the virus; they only know that they were exposed to it. Cansu Canca from AI Ethics Lab argues that apps are, in fact, more privacy-preserving than conventional methods of contact tracing, where health workers interview COVID patients and try to identify by name anyone the patients have come into close contact with. Yet this technology is still open to abuse. Ashkan Soltani, Ryan Calo, and Carl Bergstrom point out in their Brookings article that the app can be overloaded with false positives without repercussions, and false reports may, for instance, be used to diminish voter participation on an election day. Considering that the US witnessed the largest racial justice protests since the Civil Rights Movement at the height of the pandemic in 2020, the possibility that these apps can be twisted to withdraw people from the public sphere should not be neglected.
But the more pressing issue is that even if these apps are well-intentioned and privacy- preserving, it is questionable whether they are effective in protecting the most vulnerable communities, i.e., those who have been socially and economically marginalized and hence more likely to suffer from the severe consequences of COVID due to lower access to healthcare and higher rates of underlying health conditions. For contact tracing apps to be effective in containing the spread of the virus, several conditions must be met: Individuals should own smartphones, there has to be widely available, regular testing for COVID, individuals should trust the government and their private partners so that they disclose their positive test results and finally, those who are notified of exposure should have the economic means and space to self- isolate. However, these are precisely the conditions that the most disadvantaged segments of society cannot meet, mainly due to a lack of economic means and job security as well as lower trust in government, as the level of vaccine hesitancy also showed later on.
Ultimately people should discuss and decide for themselves if there should be a digital tool for COVID response. But the idea that Covid tracing apps are more effective solutions compared to less invasive alternatives needs more justification. Even though digital tracing tools mark a technological advancement, they are limited in what they can achieve when embedded in a society that systemically and disproportionately disadvantages certain groups. These limitations should compel us to reconsider if the risk to privacy that these apps create is worth taking. What gets in the way of good public outcomes is often not individual autonomy and privacy but the long-standing structural inequality.
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