Who’s watching you? The mainstream acceptance of digital surveillance in times of crisis
Technology and digital connectivity have created an unprecedented ability to track individuals’ movements, interactions, and actions. While this ability is not new, it was never fully tolerated to the extent we are witnessing now.
The advertisement industry was quick to embrace tracking capabilities that the internet and smart devices offer, and the increasing targeted ads started to raise the alarm on privacy issues surrounding people’s digital footprint. But at the end of the day, it was all in the name of ‘good’ capitalism — marketers wanted to make their methods more efficient and people were at most getting ads they didn’t want, at best occasionally found something relevant. Nobody likes the idea of erosion of privacy, but it felt contained. Location tracking in a more general sense was itself embraced for its convenience. Google can tell us not only how to get somewhere, but whether there is traffic or a more optimized route. Even beyond convenience, these capabilities have demonstrated on occasion the potential to be useful tools for health and safety. Last September, an Apple watch saved a man’s life. After suffering a fall while mountain biking, the watch detected, based on bio-metric readings, what seemed to be a hard fall and sent the man’s location to both emergency services and his son for rescue.[1]
Yet despite the positive use cases and hesitant steps we have made towards reluctant acceptance of sharing data, tracking and mass data collection have inherent issues, namely privacy concerns over how data is being stored and handled, and the risk of interference by government and private actors. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has created a new environment, allowing for rapid and open acceptance of these technological abilities in the name of public health. The question now is have we created a world that we can step back from when the health crisis ‘ends’?
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the private and public sectors have turned to technological solutions to help reduce the spread of the virus. MIT has come out with the Private Kit: Safe Paths project, an app developed to help curb the spread of COVID-19. Through the app, people who test positive can choose to their location data with health officials and with other users, basically generating a map of potential infection zones. The location data is encrypted and decentralized, allegedly making it impossible to see the information of the actual individuals who opt in.[2] Researchers at Harvard Medical School have been trying to use machine learning and social media data to monitor and track the virus, mining social media posts using natural language processing for mentions of relevant symptoms. The goal is not only to identify clusters of potential outbreaks, but also data on who the virus is affecting most.[3] Google, Amazon and Facebook have been called on by the U.S. Government to consider ways to harness the power of their enormous tracking and data collection arsenals to fight the virus. [4] Google has taken the first step with the announcement of COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, which aggregate and anonymize location data and chart movement trends.[5] While these organizations have maintained emphasis on anonymization of data, other apps and tracking tools are being introduced with far less emphasis on encryption and decentralization.
At the state level, numerous governments have taken more radical steps in harnessing these technological capabilities under the umbrella of public health. Singapore has created a dashboard providing specific information on infected individuals, including age, gender, place of work and street of residence.[6] Smartphone surveillance is being used aggressively in China to help determine and control who is deemed safe to be out of quarantine. While the app is technically opt in, it is required to get on most forms of transportation across the country now. A deep dive into the app’s software revealed that after users grant access to their personal data, that data is shared directly with the government and police.[7] The Israeli government recently greenlit the use of counter-terrorism digital intelligence tools to monitor infected individuals, without their consent.[8] These are only a few examples to highlight the types of initiatives being introduced, all of which could fundamentally change the rules concerning fair use of digital information. Governments aren’t stopping at location tracking either. There is an increased demand for and deployment of facial recognition technology, often combined with bio-metric reading capabilities.[9] Edge computing is making facial recognition easier, faster and more reliable.
We can now, with never seen before precision, know everything about a person — their health profile, their likes and dislikes, their political leanings, where they live, work, and congregate, and who they interact with, when and how. These capabilities are being embraced with unprecedented ease in a time of fear. There are clear positive benefits to being able to harness the power of digital data. We want to save the next mountain biker and heart attack victim. However, we need to be careful in what we allow to become the norm. There will always be another crisis, another ‘enemy’, an argument to prioritize health and security over privacy, but the long-term cost could be much higher.
#CBSDigitalLiteracy
[2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/coronavirus-tracking-app-must-go-viral/
[3] https://www.wired.com/story/how-ai-tracking-coronavirus-outbreak/
[5] https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
[6] https://www.againstcovid19.com/singapore/
[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/01/business/china-coronavirus-surveillance.html
[9] https://threatpost.com/covid-19-spurs-facial-recognition-tracking-privacy-fears/153953/
