Community Organizations Can Reduce the Privacy Impacts of Surveillance During COVID-19

By ADRIAN GROPPER, MD Until scientists discover a vaccine or treatment for COVID-19, our economy and our privacy will be at the mercy of imperfect technology used to manage the pandemic response. Contact tracing, symptom capture and immunity assessment are essential tools for pandemic response, which can benefit from appropriate technology. However, the effectiveness of these tools is constrained by the privacy concerns inherent in mass surveillance. Lack of trust diminishes voluntary participation. Coerced surveillance can lead to hiding and to the injection of false information. But it’s not a zero-sum game. The introduction of local community organizations as trusted intermediaries can improve participation, promote trust, and reduce the privacy impact of health and social surveillance. Balancing Surveillance with Privacy Privacy technology can complement surveillance technology when it drives adoption through trust borne of transparency and meaningful choice. We can try to understand privacy technology from the perspective of decentralization. Decentralization keeps all personally identifiable information under the user’s control, therefore offering total transparency over its use and total choice over how it is used. Ideally, managing contact tracing, testing, test interpretation, symptom reporting, health records, relationships, and location history should be decentralized. This information should be entirely under the control of the ind...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: CORVID-19 Data Health Policy Adrian Gropper contact tracing COVID-19 data privacy health data privacy Source Type: blogs