Can state surveillance be an option against the spread of COVID-19?

Smartphones could be a powerful weapon against the novel coronavirus. But tracking people’s movements would offend many Americans’ sense of privacy.

For each new transmission of coronavirus, imagine the “tick tick tick” of a stopwatch. At least 2 million adults in the US could require hospitalization over the course of the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates; that’s more than double the nation’s supply of hospital beds. Curfews and social distancing will hopefully help mete out the number of infections slowly—because 2 million patients over 18 months will be more manageable than 2 million over six months. Yet all such predictions are essentially guesswork at this point.

. Early research on coronavirus suggests that isolating people soon after they become symptomatic plays the “largest role in determining whether an outbreak [is] controllable.”

Officials have a powerful potential surveillance tool unavailable in past epidemics: smartphones.

Government officials are anxious to tap the information from phones to help monitor and blunt the pandemic. White House officials are asking tech companies for more insight into our social networks and travel patterns. Facebook created a disease mapping tool that tracks the spread of disease by aggregating user travel patterns.

Such efforts clash with people’s expectations of privacy. Now, there’s a compelling reason to collect and share the data; surveillance may save lives. But it will be difficult to draw boundaries around what data is collected, who gets to use it, and how long the collection will continue.

Some lawyers and academics have suggested that public health officials tap the geofencing capability of phones, to learn who may have been near people infected with the virus. Police have relied on geofencing in investigations, using broad warrants to request information on every smartphone near a crime scene.

Evan Selinger, a privacy expert and philosophy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, says partnerships between tech companies and government agencies could create a “Covid-19 response infrastructure” that incentivizes companies to “find creative ways to benefit from mission creep.”

The rapid spread of the disease has prompted even some traditional defenders of personal privacy to acknowledge the potential benefits of digital tracking. “Public policy must reflect a balance between collective good and civil liberties in order to protect the health and safety of our society from communicable disease outbreaks,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote in a blog post earlier this month. But, the group continued, any data collection “must be scientifically justified and … proportionate to the need.”

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/surveillance-save-lives-amid-public-health-crisis/