As we enter the fourth week of the COVID pandemic, each US state has been made responsible for it’s own management of the response. In the state of Texas, one of the early executive orders by the governor was to require a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering Texas from various “hot spots” around the country, including from Louisiana. How would those quarantines be enforced? Media outlets reported that the Texas Department of Public Safety would track these people while they were in quarantine but how effective is this? When does Public Safety become more important than individual privacy rights? In many countries they have started tracking people using phone information (See here). As I read this article, I could hear privacy rights proponents in America screaming “NOT IN THE UNITED STATES!!! EVER!!!
This is a very interesting question that will not be answered during this crisis but will continue to resonate way beyond it’s termination. How do we control the early stages of a possible pandemic? Knowing who came into contact with whom is crucial to stopping this early spread. A more invasive government would see this phone location data as a valuable resource for this contact map. In the United States, this data collection has been done using geolocation data from advertising sources. One source showed people were continuing to gather in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and this information was handed over to local authorities. Let’s take this further. If the same data showed that an infected person visited a popular restaurant in New York City and that data was exposed to the public, what impact would that have on that business? This is what has happened in South Korea on more than one occasion. And in Iran, the government told its citizens to install a tracking app.
This conversation does need some air time once we come out of this pandemic. Americans greatly value their privacy and independence – I would even say that is one of the hallmarks of American society. In an increasingly connected where viruses can traverse the globe in a single day, I am afraid this won’t be the last major viral outbreak. What lessons will we learn from this? What changes will we see next time? Will we find the balance between privacy and public safety?
I understand the need to track where and who a “patient zero” might be. But at the same time…didn’t we learn something from George Orwell? I don’t know. I’m conflicted.