Will privacy be a post- pandemic victim in the state?
As he announced the state’s new effort to track and contact people who may have been exposed to the coronavirus, Gov. Ned Lamont acknowledged an inherent concern: “it sounds a little Big Brother.”
The contact tracing effort will take procedures already in use for monitoring the spread of diseases like tuberculosis and scale it up for slowing down COVID, with hundreds of volunteers to be trained on contacting people who may have been exposed to a sick person and instructing them to quarantine.
Along with an announced, then quickly shelved, plan by Westport Police to use drones for surveillance, efforts to monitor the spread of the disease have raised new questions about where public health collides with personal privacy in the post- pandemic world.
“It does spell real concern about our life after COVID- 19,” said David McGuire, director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut. “Whatever we do during this public health emergency needs to be grounded in public health and science, not fear, and it needs to be limited in this crisis.” That means having explicit policies on data usage and safeguards, and having all efforts run by public health departments, not law enforcement, he said.
“With any surveillance technology, we’re always concerned about mission creep,” McGuire said.
Lamont and Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe both defended the data security of the state’s contact tracing effort, which is currently being developed with Microsoft, and believe people will willingly participate.
“My sense is most people understand how important the contact tracing is,” Lamont said, adding that it’s optional for people who test positive for coronavirus to provide their most recent contacts to the state. “If you don’t want to participate, you don’t have to, but the people you were in contact with will be at some risk for that reason, so we urge you to participate.”
Some of it can be done anonymously, Yale School of Public Health Dean Sten Vermund said, which could make it easier to cope with handing over that information.
Volunteers need to know who sick people interacted with before they were diagnosed, to instruct those people to quarantine, but they don’t need to know the patient’s identity.
“The personal liberty offense there is actually very much in the person’s self interest,” he said. “You don’t want to invade someone’s privacy unless you’re going to do them some good. There’s the promise of good for the individual and then the privacy issues are not as dramatic.”
He added that other illnesses, like tuberculosis, come with much stronger public health protections over privacy: in all 50 states, people can be forcibly confined and treated to stop the spread of that infectious disease. Contact tracing, while potentially seen as invasive, is “a routine part of public health.”
“You saw a test case in Westport where there was a lot of protest about the drone program almost immediately after the news broke,” the ACLU’s McGuire said. “People are not willing to wholesale trade their privacy and liberty for a speculative promise of a way to safeguard against COVID- 19.”