The Paradox of Privacy Protection in a COVID World

The success of the world in tackling COVID often depends on access to personal data. When authorities find a person who tests positive for the virus, it often becomes essential to be able to know who the person has come into contact in the past weeks and where s/he has been, so that contact tracing enables more testing that can prevent the emergence of clustered infections. Such successful contact tracing requires the tested individuals to reveal some very personal details about their lifestyles.

Yet, from a pure privacy point of view, there is hesitance of the individuals in question to cooperate fully with the authorities. Requiring people to divulge who they met and where they have been may bring up sensitive details that people are highly unwilling to share with others, especially if there are prospects of those details, whether by intention or error, are released to a larger group of people, who then proceed to stigmatize COVID-carriers not only for the disease but also aspects of their lifestyles.

The paradox for the greater-than-ever need for real-time and detailed personal information, combined with reticence among many to divulge the same information, presents the authorities with the need to think about how exactly to go about collecting personal data from suspected COVID-carriers and then store them securely and share them selectively. For many advanced democracies where cultural and political values see privacy protection as an essential part of human rights, the need for governments to act carefully is particularly great.

One method that has been widely praised is the implementation of COVID tracking mobile apps. Governments in several places that are deemed COVID containment success stories, including Taiwan and Singapore, have rolled out a centrally designed and managed app that allows users to indicate their health and easily provide data on where they have been and what other app users they came into close contact with. For a tech-savvy population with a relatively high level of trust in the authorities, such digital systems have worked relatively well.

But their success has not been universal, often precisely due to privacy concerns. Anything short of governments forcefully downloading the app on all smartphones would lead to a process in which individual users are given the choice of using the app or not. Given the stigma surrounding contracting the virus and the job of the app, first and foremost, is to record and disseminate information about who tested positive, many people would opt out of using the app at all due to privacy concerns.

That reluctance to use COVID tracing apps due to privacy concerns mirror a larger trend of people forgoing all mobile apps that they think to collect and then abuse too much of their data. Fears of privacy loss have led to people shifting away from formerly popular social media platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp, and take up alternatives like Singal and Telegram that has gained users with the explicit promise of collecting as little data on their users as possible.

That increasing desire for people to be digitally anonymous will make the work of COVID-fighting authorities increasingly difficult. Every measure that is taken against COVID by government authorities, from knowing where infections are spiking to distributing stimulus checks, has required governments to analyze big sets of data that is most efficiently, and sometimes only feasibly, collected through people leaving some sort of digital footprint. If people refuse to do so, the process breaks down.

Resolving this paradox would require governments to navigate the tightrope between the needs of managing the pandemic and the popular demand to respect privacy. That may take a combination of getting people to sacrifice some privacy in an appeal for the greater good of keeping everyone healthy, and providing more concrete reassurances that data collected is secure, by establishing independent and transparent processes for data management.