In the past, I and many others have called on regulators, journalists, and policy people to move from the current model of privacy as individual consent, to a model that treats it more like public health or environmental law, a public good. For example: https://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm …
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This epidemic is another good example of where the individual consent model for privacy fails. If we want to use cell phone tracking to track the potential spread of infection, we have to impose that on the population, and people can't be allowed to opt out
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There are also monumental privacy and civil liberties costs associated to this kind of tracking. You can think of it as similar to forced quarantine: a situation where an overriding health emergency, by public consent, is enough to curtail people's freedoms for a limited time
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But this model doesn't work when the "limited time" part is not available. Cell phone records and user location data, as well as derived information from that (like machine learning models) are currently stored in perpetuity by private actors, with almost zero regulation
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If we want the ability to make full use of large-scale technical surveillance for things like slowing an epidemic (and we do!), then we need a 'peacetime' regulatory framework for the surveillance economy that is far stricter about limiting data retention, resale, and so on
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Otherwise people will correctly perceive these attempts as a ratchet effect to further erode online privacy. In a situation where legal protection is defined by concepts like 'reasonable expectation of privacy', rather than strict objective limits, surveillance powers only go up
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This leaves us in a frustrating position where we have the technical infrastructure for unprecedented contagion tracking, but there is no way for democratic governments to credibly reassure people that the tracking will be used only for this one purpose, and do no lasting harm
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Replying to @Pinboard
This is well put. I had previously shied away from location tracking for digital epi because of privacy concerns. My calculus has shifted with the pandemic and I now believe the societal benefits to connecting COVID status to location data outweigh the costs for the time being.
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It’s definitely not a requirement that we all give up privacy to get automated contact tracing. The http://CoEpi.org design allows users to track their contacts in a completely private manner, without anyone being able to track them or each other.
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