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Are #Covid19 tracking programs an expansion of the surveillance state in public health disguise? A new @hrw publication examines key privacy & human rights concerns with global push to adopt contact tracing apps & other mobile tracking tech https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/13/covid-19-apps-pose-serious-human-rights-risks">https://www.hrw.org/news/2020... 1/
Mobile location data can contain sensitive & revealing insights about our identities, location, behavior & associations. Before handing it over to govs for contact tracing & quarantine enforcement we have to ask the basic questions: Will it work? And at what cost? #COVID19 2/
Already we& #39;ve seen in South Korea, public health text message alerts based on the location history of known #COVID19 infected individuals led to people getting doxed and targeted with hate speech & harassment https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/06/more-scary-than-coronavirus-south-koreas-health-alerts-expose-private-lives">https://www.theguardian.com/world/202... 3/
In Israel, citing privacy concerns the Supreme Court ruled that the government must bring the expansive phone tracking program under legislation or end it. It& #39;s been renewed but considerable concerns remain about its legality & rights implications https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/10003">https://www.adalah.org/en/conten... 4/
In the cases of tech-driven #COVID19 responses we examined, we found govts tend to collect, use & retain data beyond what is necessary for legitimate & targeted disease surveillance w/o meaningful limits on data collection, retention, & use or transparency to evaluate them 5/
Will tech-driven solutions work? The truth is many of these data-intensive technologies being deployed are untested and unproven, and may in fact misrepresent an individual’s risk of infection or mislead the public #COVID19 6/
As @_alialkhatib points out, the exclusions of digital contact tracing will undermine their accuracy & the risks of acting on bad data - the result of excluding the poor, excluding older people, kids & high-risk groups - are unspeakably high 7/ https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/digital-contact-tracing">https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/digi...
Over-reliance on mobile location tracking for #COVID19 responses could exclude marginalized people who don& #39;t have reliable access to the internet & mobile technology, putting their health and livelihoods at risk 8/ https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/25/closing-digital-divide-critical-covid-19-response">https://www.hrw.org/news/2020...
As my colleague @AmosToh puts it: Mobile tracking solutions create a two-tiered response to the pandemic that threatens to leave the poorest and most vulnerable people behind #COVID19 9/
We know that surveillance measures put in place during emergencies long outlast their initial justification. Nearly 20 years after 9/11, we& #39;re still fighting to end bulk collection of phone metadata by US intelligence agencies h/t @kianves https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/05/us-end-bulk-data-collection-program">https://www.hrw.org/news/2020... 10/
In sum, we seriously question whether #COVID19 tracking initiatives can meet international human rights standards (necessity & proportionality). If your govt is pursuing them, we developed guidelines to evaluate the human rights risks they pose https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/13/mobile-location-data-and-covid-19-qa">https://www.hrw.org/news/2020... 11/11
