Citizens’ privacy rights under threat during global pandemic
Privacy has already been eroded to a degree inconceivable to the apartheid security services
I REMEMBER when my phone was tapped. At the TRC, I asked chief torturer, former apartheid security policeman captain Liebenberg, whether he was responsible for bugging my phone. “No meneer,” he replied, “it wasn’t us. That was someone else’s department.”
Privacy has already been eroded to a degree inconceivable to the Stasi, the Gestapo or the apartheid security services.
Our search histories are owned by Google, searchable by security forces and private individuals working for those forces. Facebook has so much information on us that it can identify users who are pregnant before the users themselves are aware.
Now Covid-19 provides the backdrop to a further massive and worldwide erosion of privacy.
In China, anyone wishing to travel must install a smartphone app that gives users a colour-coded designation based on their health status and travel history.
Green allows you to travel freely. Orange indicates you must go home.
Red indicates you are breaking quarantine. There is, obviously, a strong epidemiological explanation for why this system is useful.
But no one seriously believes that China will stop using this monitoring tool to control people’s travel, including for reasons unrelated to health, once the Covid-19 crisis is over.
In Chile, immunity certificates will be issued to those who have had the virus. They will be free to return to work and go where they wish, while all others remain in lockdown.
There are things about which one must be an absolutist, and this is one of them. “Contract tracing”, “physical distancing” and “lockdown” are new concepts, but where governments create one class of citizens, determined by biological features, who are allowed to go to the cinema, to beaches, to travel and to have jobs while the others must stay locked away, we already have a name for this: apartheid.
“Apple and Google partner on Covid-19 contact tracing technology” are among the most terrifying words in the English language.
This translates to every smartphone (and its owner) being tracked wherever they go, who they meet being recorded and this information being provided to governments.
The effects for freedom of association are obvious. In many parts of the world, attending a protest becomes far more dangerous: your name will go on a list. But so, too, is being, or having been, in the company of anyone a later government decides is undesirable.
A mosque in America might be one example.
We are entering a moment where privacy rights, which underpin so many other rights, have come to be regarded almost as a joke.
“How can you worry about that when there are far greater, more immediate concerns?” is the justification used by every repressive government in history to erode its citizens’ rights.
War criminal George W Bush’s Patriot Act is the paradigmatic modern example. He used the 9/11 attacks to pass sweeping and discriminatory police and surveillance powers, including the right to detain indefinitely without charge.
At the time, Bush argued that those powers were essential to deal with a crisis, and were temporary.
The powers still exist 19 years later. Today, modern George W Bushes will argue, “How can you worry about privacy when we need to get the economy running to feed our people?”, though feeding people was never previously a priority. The right to privacy is not the only right that matters.
“If you were to offer the people only revolution,” Soviet leader Khrushchev once observed, they will reply: “Fine, but what we would really like is a goulash.”
In South Africa today, this view is popular, and understandable. It feels precious, even out of touch, to talk about grand freedoms like privacy when the basic freedom to live free from want is not only under threat, but denied to so many in our country.
But privacy from government is a right that underpins so many others. It does matter for everyone.
Once given up, it requires far more than a vote to win back.