[ad_1]
By Shashidhar KJ
With the unprecedented spread of the COVID19 disease worldwide and the spiraling death count, tech giants like Google and Facebook are stepping up their efforts to help governments contain the outbreak. Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that Google and Facebook are in talks with the US government. USA To assist in the fight against the pandemic by sharing anonymous and aggregated location data of users obtained from smartphones. After the United States, these companies have also announced that they are in talks with the UK government and some telecommunications companies to share similar data to combat the disease in the country.
The idea is that, using aggregated and anonymous data, health officials can see if people really maintain social distancing. For example, if there are many people who visit a particular place and travel together, officials can use data to help them find shelter or help them get home.
A more invasive measure public health officials use is contact tracing, where actual or suspected patients can be monitored using location data and messages can be sent to them requiring them to be tested and contain the infections. A contact tracking alert generally includes the infected person’s age, sex, and a detailed record of their movements backed up by additional databases such as credit card companies. At the moment, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Israel have enacted emergency measures to allow tracking of contacts from mobile phones.
A contact tracking alert generally includes the infected person’s age, sex, and a detailed record of their movements backed up by additional databases such as credit card companies.
So far, Google and Facebook have said that they are not giving exact user location data to governments. Google said it received a lot of requests to enable contact tracking, but did not have the appropriate data for it. However, for these tech giants, not having the proper data doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to do so. Google maintains a detailed history of the user’s GPS location data (users can disable it and choose not to participate).
Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has noted that the company has developed a Disease Prevention Map as part of its Data For Good initiative, which uses anonymous and aggregated location data to track the movement of people in case of a disaster. These maps were created by pairing with public, proprietary, and user-generated data sets. Until now, these maps have been used by public health officials to increase vaccination campaigns in Malawi and create a risk model for cholera outbreaks in Mozambique. Google, on the other hand, has started a project with its sister company Verily where users can volunteer to share medical data with researchers and pharmaceutical companies. For now, the project is still in the beta phase and requires users to complete a questionnaire about their health status. Using the tickets, you will redirect them to three test sites in the San Francisco Bay area.
These tools will undoubtedly help policymakers and researchers gauge their efforts to ensure that people adhere to the rules of social distancing. However, privacy hawks point to old concerns about the scope of surveillance with modern digital technologies.
Although technology companies say they will guarantee a user’s anonymity, it has been repeatedly shown that users have been re-identified with advances in technology and data collection. For example, a 2018 study showed that anonymized data collected from wearable activity trackers entered into a machine learning algorithm was successfully re-identified. The anonymous data used in the study removed the location and protected health information (including name, phone number, email address, etc.). The study showed that 94.9% of 4,720 adults and 87.4% of 2,427 children were successfully reidentified with a set of participants.
Privacy hawks point to old concerns about the scope of surveillance with modern digital technologies.
But what is most concerning about the COVID19 pandemic is the fact that governments themselves are voluntarily giving out more sensitive information about potentially infected patients and people. The scientific journal Nature notes that numerous applications and websites have emerged that publish information from government websites about people who have tested positive for the virus, including travel history, the hospital where they are being treated, age, sex, nationality, family relationships. with other infected people, local groups, etc. For example, COVID19 SG is a website that collects information and data from the Singapore Ministry of Health.
Closer to home in India, states like Karnataka and Telangana have started publishing information on international passengers who have been asked to be quarantined. Although these panels do not mention the names of the passengers, virtually any other information about them has been published, including their home address, passport number, and travel itinerary.
Privacy researchers say the specificity of the information in each published case is what worries them: a person with COVID19 or people in quarantine could easily identify themselves and compromise their right to privacy. Loss of privacy in these scenarios would lead to social stigma. This could even discourage people from getting tested, as their information will be made public if they test positive. On a broader level, these lists can be abused where e-commerce companies can create negative lists and refuse delivery to these addresses for fear of risk of infection, a crucial service right now when most stores are closed. .
But as panic grows, there will be a greater push to forgo privacy for a more secure future.
More invasive people-tracking and tracing measures have been introduced in Hong Kong, where passengers arriving from international terminals receive a bracelet and are required to download an app that tracks their location to ensure they are quarantined. The bracelet geofence a user and will send an alert to government officials if it discovers that they have left their homes. Karnataka government now requires quarantined people send a selfie every hour at a request from the government to demonstrate that they are staying home, otherwise they would be transferred to a mass quarantine facility.
These are extraordinary times that require extraordinary measures to contain damage by COVID19. But as panic grows, there will be a greater push to forgo privacy for a more secure future. This was demonstrated in a recent webinar organized by the Department for the Promotion of Internal Trade and Industry (DPIIT) where a series of lights from the ecosystem of technology startups devised solutions to contain the disease. One of the measures discussed was to take advantage of prescriptions in pharmacies to identify populations at risk (elderly, people with immunocompromised conditions, respiratory disorders, etc.). Recipes are considered confidential personal data due to the large number of identifiers they contain, but participants felt that privacy needs had to be suspended for the greater good.
This need to ignore privacy extends beyond medical data. As the webinar continued, requests were made to re-enable the Aadhaar eKYC to “kick-start the fintech ecosystem”. Aadhaar eKYC was excluded after the Supreme Court ruling that Aadhaar cannot be used by private companies as it unnecessarily exposes personal information to them. Yashish Dahiya, CEO of PolicyBazaar, argued that his company company Paisabazaar’s revenue had been reduced to almost zero as his staff was unable to complete physical KYC for loan products during the closing period announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, hence, the need for Aadhaar eKYC. This demonstrates an opportunism to benefit their business models while ignoring the biggest privacy concerns using Aadhaar’s data.
The world’s top tech companies have built their fortunes by failing to take sufficient steps to protect users’ privacy to fuel their advertising businesses. How willing are governments and companies not to violate individual privacy?
Governments and companies believe that privacy needs to be suspended to address the effects of the virus, from both a public and economic health perspective. But what happens to this extensive surveillance apparatus once the crisis is over? What will be the steps to dismantle it? The world’s top tech companies have built their fortunes by failing to take sufficient steps to protect users’ privacy to fuel their advertising businesses. How willing are governments and companies not to violate individual privacy?
This pandemic has been called the black swan event, the first since September 11. The United States government, after this, increased mass surveillance without a warrant through the National Security Agency (NSA) under the guise of security and deterrence of future attacks. Subsequent research shows that mass surveillance did little to achieve those goals. Instead, what worked were traditional investigative methods, tips from informants, and targeted intelligence operations. Similarly, for the public health system, traditional methods need to be strengthened, such as increasing the number of doctors and hospitals, storing enough equipment and supplies for future epidemics and pandemics, free testing facilities, etc. Increasing health care capacity will help prevent undue invasions of privacy and strike an optimal balance between individual rights and the broader public interest.
* Shashidhar KJ is an associate member of the Observer Research Foundation. This article has been cross-referenced from the Observer Research Foundation website.
[ad_2]
