The trade-offs are changing:
As countries all over the world competition to support the pandemic, most are deploying electronic surveillance equipment as a way to exert social handle, even turning security company technologies by themselves civilians. Health and police authorities are understandably wanting to employ every device at their disposal to attempt to hinder the herpes virus even while the surveillance initiatives threaten to improve the precarious stability between public protection and personal personal privacy on a worldwide scale.
However ratcheting up surveillance to fight the pandemic today could permanently open up the doors to even more invasive types of snooping later.
I think that the consequences of COVID-19 could be more drastic than the ramifications of the terrorist attacks of 9/11: not merely regarding surveillance, but across many areas of our society. Even though many things that could never be appropriate during normal period are reasonable things you can do right now, we have to makes sure we are able to ratchet them back after the current pandemic has ended.
Cindy Cohn at EFF wrote:
We understand that this virus requires us to do something that might be unthinkable in regular periods. Staying inside, limiting open public gatherings, and cooperating with medically required attempts to track the herpes virus are usually, when approached correctly, reasonable and accountable things you can do. But we should be as vigilant once we are thoughtful. We should make sure that measures used the name of giving an answer to COVID-19 are usually, in the language of international individual rights law, “essential and proportionate” to the requirements of modern society in fighting the herpes virus. Above all, we should be sure that these measures finish and that the info collected for these reasons isn’t re-purposed for either governmental or industrial ends.
I worry that inside our haste and concern, we shall fail to do some of that.
More from EFF.
