EDITORIAL: Big Brother Lends a Helping Hand
The views expressed herein represent the views of a majority of the members of the Caravel’s Editorial Board and are not reflective of the position of any individual member, the newsroom staff, or Georgetown University.
An infrared thermometer checks for fever upon entry at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. (National Palace Museum)
More than one million people have been infected with COVID-19, and more than 55,000 have died from it as of April 3, according to official estimates. Countries around the world have been scrambling to contain the virus, with about four billion people—around half the world’s population—now under lockdown orders.
Particularly crucial in the fight against COVID-19 has been the use of data and technology. Poland, Hong Kong, and South Korea have deployed apps to enforce quarantines; Singapore, Germany, and Israel are using apps for contact tracing; and the European Union, South Africa, and Taiwan have partnered with telecommunications companies to track users’ location data. Tracking measures have seen varying degrees of success, public approval, and invasiveness.
Taiwan has successfully implemented widespread tracking with widespread support, while the response to South Korea’s extensive and effective measures is more mixed. Meanwhile, Germany has tried to strike a balance between efficacy and privacy. The U.S. has yet to implement nationwide tracking measures for fear of violating personal privacy, but perhaps desperate times require a re-evaluation of priorities as the number of cases continues to rise.
One Pandemic, Two Systems
When the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Taiwan in late January, it seemed like a catastrophe in waiting. But, Taiwan had learned lessons from its botched response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003, which killed 84, according to the World Health Organization. Technology and cross-agency cooperation in what Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has called a “whole-of-government approach” are responsible for the remarkable success of containment efforts.
Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen activated the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) on January 20, which soon convened a cross-agency team to develop the technology needed to enforce self-quarantines. The Taiwanese government partners with cellular carriers to track the real-time locations of quarantined people, warn them when they have strayed out-of-bounds, and dispatch police if warnings are ignored.
Stanford Health Policy researcher Jason Wang explained in early March that Taiwan was leveraging the power of big data by integrating its National Health Insurance database with its customs database. This enabled it to target COVID-19 tests at individuals with travel histories and symptom profiles consistent with infection. These uses of civic technology so far enjoy wide support from the Taiwanese public, with a poll finding citizens give the government an average score of 84.16 out of 100 for its efforts.
There’s an App For That
The Infectious Disease Control and Prevent Act obliges South Korea’s government to keep its citizens informed about its work to fight the spread of COVID-19. The government has risen to the occasion, leveraging technology-enabled radical transparency to engage the public in containment efforts. Twice-a-day press conferences are complemented by a constellation of government-developed and private sector-led apps that provide information on how to self-diagnose as at-risk and access COVID-19 testing services.
An app developed by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety helps quarantined COVID-19 patients communicate with government officials and medical professionals. (Smart Cities World)
South Korea’s central contact tracing effort uses artificial intelligence to build a movement history for those who test positive for the virus. Credit card transactions, CCTV footage, and phone location data are combined to create a history of the infected person’s location. Then, the government publishes the history so that those that came in close contact with the infected person can self-isolate.
Though published data is anonymized, there is concern that embarrassing private information like trips to pay-by-the-hour “love hotels” could be matched with identities. Goh Jae-young, a Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) official, said that “after the spread of virus ends, there has to be society's assessment whether or not this was effective and appropriate."
German Efficiency
Taking a different approach to technology as a tool to monitor the pandemic, German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed the development of an app to anonymously collect data using Bluetooth to track users’ proximity to other cell phones. The app would allow medical professionals to gain permission from those infected and put their information into a central server. The initiative, known as the Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), aims to comply with the European Union’s strict General Data Protection Regulation by making anonymous use of Bluetooth technology without storing data from geolocation tracking.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the public about the threat of COVID-19 in a rare scripted national speech on March 18. (Brookings Institution)
Epidemiologists are hopeful that this technology will allow Germany to ease its current lockdown measures and contain flare-ups. This policy treads the careful line between the contact tracing critical to following the coronavirus’s progression through a population and the 1984-esque surveillance-state nature of some other policies.
Boot-Strapping & Straight-Jacketing
In the United States, the coronavirus response has been characterized by early inaction and a disjointed, state-by-state approach, exacerbating the virus’ spread. Already, the United States has reported nearly 276,000 cases, the most in any country, and shows no signs of stopping. The president’s damaging claims about resources, including that N-95 masks are disappearing in hospitals for nefarious reasons and that there is no longer a shortage of test kits, show a gross misunderstanding of the situation the country is currently in and puts Americans’ lives at risk. “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment—try getting it yourselves,” Trump suggested to state governors on a conference call. The federal government has passed the responsibility for handling the response to COVID-19 to the states, resulting in a patchwork strategy that may extend the duration of the virus.
When the CDC predicts that up to 200,000 Americans may die if the disease is not controlled, why does the U.S. still lack a uniform tracking and tracing policy? One roadblock is a systemic issue in American culture and in the American system: capitalism-driven individualism. The myth of the American Dream perpetuates an every-man-for-himself mentality that makes the community response required to slow the spread of a pandemic disease incredibly difficult.
American individualism makes effective collection action to combat the society-wide threat of COVID-19 challenging. (Wikimedia Commons)
While measures such as social distancing have predicted value in slowing the rate of disease, most individuals will not see the tangible benefits of the practice. Along with confusing misinformation, nihilistic attitudes expressing a lack of concern about the disease, and patchwork strategies where some governors take the pandemic more seriously than others, nobody is sure how far the coronavirus has spread in the country or where the next flare-up will be.
Though using technology to trace the disease and control its spread could help to solve the problems created by a failure to follow social distancing guidelines, Americans have understandable concerns about their right to privacy and the reach of government. Particularly when faced with the prospect of government location-tracking, people fear the way that the government might misuse the data it collects. (Fears were not eased by a recent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court opinion that the FBI has been unlawfully using communications data collected by the National Security Agency to identify foreign terrorists for the past 12 years.)
While some countries have proposed temporary surveillance solutions or anonymous ones (like in Germany), the threat of a privacy violation in the United States and the failure to understand the importance of community action prevents even a well-built technology strategy from being used. The question may come down to this: what trends are we normalizing right now that could become weaponized against democracy later?
Getting Our Priorities Straight
The United States government already has your data. Or, at least, it already has a lot of your data, from your tax information and the photo on your passport to your flight history and, in many cases, your fingerprints. More troublingly, corporations have even more of it. Technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon develop complex models of users’ genders, ages, incomes, races, sexual orientations, interests, geolocations, and affiliations in order to better target the advertising that funds their global dominance.
Demonstrators gathered in front of the British Parliament building in 2018 to protest Cambridge Analytica, a British firm that exploited Facebook’s lax data security policies to microtarget misleading political advertisements. (Wikimedia Commons)
Compared with the scads of data that people across the U.S. surrender to companies for no money and with little oversight, allowing the government to collect and use our data to protect our country’s health seems a low price to pay. The government tracking our locations to effectively trace and isolate COVID-19 patients seems a better use of our data right now than Facebook tracking our locations to offer us a discount at nearby sushi restaurants. Americans need to get their priorities in order, or our government will continue to fight COVID-19 blind.
Better the Devil You Vote For Than the Devil You Don’t
Technology provides governments with unique tools to combat this pandemic, including big data, artificial intelligence, location tracking, and more, that were not available during previous outbreaks. Central to the effective use of these tools is a unified government response, which the U.S. sorely lacks.
While the potential for governments to misuse these tools is an ever-present danger, the good that can come from using these technologies responsibly has been demonstrated by the success stories of Taiwan and South Korea. Despite numerous countries’ use of technological responses, the U.S. has largely avoided such measures for fear of raising privacy concerns, but perhaps privacy is a subordinate concern when fighting a global pandemic. After all, what the U.S. government does not already know, Facebook and Google do.
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