Watching the watchers

As governments and employers around the word embrace new technological tools to aid COVID19 contact-tracing, Congress should look to traditional law enforcement tools to protect citizens' privacy and civil liberties.

If responsible steps to rein in the pandemic require dramatic changes in how much information people share about their health and movements, Congress has a duty to assure the public that there will be meaningful accountability in how their data are being used.

Smartphone apps offer promising tools for collecting data about users' movements and sharing that information with public health authorities. The more detailed these tools are, the more useful they are - and the greater the privacy and civil liberties risks. The International Digital Accountability Council (IDAC) - of which I am the president - recently conducted an analysis of 108 COVID apps in 41 countries and found that while many of them employed laudable privacy and security measures, some developers and governments failed to follow best practices with respect to transparency, security, requests for permissions, and third-party data-sharing.

Past crises such as 9/11 have shown that once our privacy is surrendered, it can be hard to reclaim. Altering the delicate set of protections against excessive surveillance by government and private sector partners is something that should only be done after careful consideration and balancing, with meaningful accountability protections in place. Unfortunately, discussion of legislative solutions in the beltway debate has so far remained deadlocked along partisan lines relating to preemption and private rights of action.

New thinking about measures to assure accountability could help break the deadlock.

Law enforcement and consumer protection agencies are adept at launching investigations and enforcement actions against the worst actors when legal viola