Pandemic Privacy in the Workplace
Some workers are already more vulnerable. Technology that exposes their COVID-19 status will not help.
By Anne L. Washington PhD and Lauren Rhue PhD
Should your barista know if you tested positive for COVID-19? Should you know if your barista tested positive?
As the economy reopens from the pandemic, some workers will face new forms of digital vulnerability because they work where virus transmissions will occur. Those in the service sector—including educators, home health aides, librarians, and mail carriers—may soon have their personal health data broadcast publicly.
Remote sensing thermometers transmit body temperature. Contact tracing applications reveal location history. These technological solutions largely ignore the social impact disclosure will have on individual workers and their professional relationships.
Workplace health and privacy risks are not evenly distributed. A March 2019 Gallup poll found that essential workers came within arms-reach of 22 people each day compared to four people for non-essential workers. Occupations deemed as “essential” in the pandemic, such as grocery store clerks and sanitation workers, are exposed to the average health of the public they serve. Accountants, managers, lawyers, or others who can work from home are typically exposed to only a smaller fixed number of employees in a defined workplace.
Service sector workers may be forced to share otherwise private information to keep their jobs. In fact, their entire household may have to endure surveillance to control potential exposure to Coronavirus on the job.
Furthermore, people working in service positions do not have the effective power to control whom they serve, making them uniquely vulnerable to the health choices of others. Standards of good professional service might require workers to ignore their own personal safety. Worse, customers may leverage their privilege in customer-centric businesses to demand private information about service-sector employees.
The unequal mortality rates across populations may be employment-related factors that impact patient health, yet are less readily available than skin color and co-morbidity factors such as hypertension or diabetes.
Weighing the benefits to public health against the threats to worker privacy owing to occupation demands immediate attention. By overlooking work-related digital and health exposure, we may resort to victim-blaming while ignoring the people at the greatest risk.
Anne L. Washington is Assistant Professor of Data Policy at New York University and Data & Society 2016–2017 Faculty Fellow.
Lauren Rhue is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Robert H. Smith School of Business in University of Maryland — College Park. Medium: @LRhue
