Silicon Valley can come up with apps that might free Americans from home confinement. But Washington fears creating an invasive surveillance system.
It is a big promise from Silicon Valley to a nation looking for ways to be freed from home confinement: Smartphones could discreetly detect those who may have COVID-19 and nudge them to quarantine, blunting renewed outbreaks as Americans start to once again venture out.
And if the system is widely used — and especially if it’s connected to a database — there will be a huge risk that data would live on well beyond the pandemic, giving governments and corporations easy access to information about people’s movements and healthcare needs that eclipses what they now have.“What I am afraid of is some folks in the tech community will use this huge public need as a way to be invasive with private data and create a beachfront in the health sector,” said Sen. Mark R.
“It is a trivial intrusion on our liberty as citizens when you compare it to all the other things during this pandemic where we have said, ‘This is necessary, we will do it,’” he said. The group, called the DP-3T Project, had been pushing a privacy-oriented approach similar to what Apple and Google have discussed — alert systems that keep the data collected anonymous and largely confined to the phones of users who opt in.By contrast, the contact-tracing tools some European leaders are now pursuing “can easily be turned into an instrument of surveillance with considerable human rights implications,” the group warned in a recent white paper.
A Bluetooth signal might be unaware that an infected individual who appeared to be in close proximity to an employee was on the other side of a wall, for example. Nor would the technology be able to register that a person identified as being at risk was wearing protective gear when they had a brush with contagion while shopping.The latest news, analysis and insights from our bureau chiefs in Sacramento and D.C.
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