By Amanda Meng
Countries across the globe are mobilizing resources to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. These resources include medical supplies and personnel, test kits, public safety, and data. Many of us are accustomed to the data visualized in national and local media, particularly data depicted as line graphs showing how Covid-19 cases can grow exponentially. While this testing data provides a snapshot-in-time of just how contagious the virus is, additional personal data -most commonly movement data – is being used by authorities around the world to stop contagion in real time. We’ll take a look at the use of personal movement data in the US, surveillance technologies in China, global deployments more broadly, and then consider what early lessons we can learn relating to values for data privacy, the need for quality and timely data collection, and what we can do now.
1: One-off business-led tracking of social distancing in the US
Unacast is a human mobility insights firm. Originally a Norwegian company, Unacast is headquartered in New York, and collects most of its personal movement data through partner-provided data, or rather, through the applications we have installed on our phones and carry with us everywhere. Most of their clients are interested in Unacasts’ analyses of data for marketing. On Tuesday, March 24th, the company launched a COVID-19 Location Data Toolkit that includes 4 tools: a custom curated dataset for a fee, an origin-destination flux tracker to measure change in mobility as COVID-19 causes us to move across neighborhoods and states (listed as “coming soon” on the website), a “Venue Impact Tracker” that looks at traffic patterns around a point of interest (also listed as “coming soon,”), and finally, the Social Distancing Scoreboard, on online tool meant to score our social distancing practice, at the county level. For example, according to their data, Fulton County, which overlaps geography with the City of Atlanta, has reduced its average distance traveled by 49 percent since February 28th.
2: Governement-led surveillance in China
The press in the United states has described the measures taken by the Chinese government as draconian, a reference to the first Athenian laws that were infamously harsh and written by an aristocrat by the name of Draco. Most of these laws were punishable by death. While it does not seem that China is using such extreme punishments to control the outbreak, they are making use of their extensive and powerful surveillance system as well as their Social Credit System to monitor and enforce containment of COVID-19.
In 2014, China launched their Social Credit System, which leverages the extensive surveillance of their citizens and business to monitor, score, and reward or punish individuals and businesses for compliance with the law. Interestingly, the system does not just use data from cameras, drones, personal movement data, transaction data, etc., but citizens can report other citizens for breaking the law. For the past few months, this same Social Credit System (SCS) has been used to track the contagion and enforce shelter in place. The Chinese government has even altered the Social Credit System to control COVID; for example, under the SCS a neighbor might previously have reported a neighbor for jaywalking, now, neighbors may report on who has traveled to and from known Covid epicenters.
Global Deployments of Technologies to Fight COVID-19
We can count on hearing more and more reports of countries using personal data to track and control the spread of COVID-19 with an array of technologies. Tech companies who sell facial recognition services are already improving their ability to detect individual faces, even when that individual is wearing a mask. Both China and Russia are using facial recognition technology to track movement and identify individuals who might exhibit symptoms. China is also using biometric testing with facial recognition to detect individuals with fevers. Alternatively, India and New York have ordered a stop use on biometrics to prevent the spread of the virus. South Koreans are using an app that takes open government health data on known cases and Bluetooth technology to alert individuals who are within 328 feet with a push notification. Similar to China, the South Korean government is also using cameras, GPS data, credit card data, and health data to trace and alert citizens. This effort is reported to help the country successfully “flatten the curve” of new cases over time. The Singapore government launched a similar app and has made the code open so that other countries may deploy contact tracing. In the US, academics are working on similar virus tracking apps. Prominent technologists and healthcare officials are calling for Apple, Facebook, and Google to share their wealth of personal movement data to enable the US to deploy surveillance technologies and contact trace apps. These companies are in talks with the White House towards these ends. Taiwan, Israel Italy, Germany, and Austria are all using mobile phone data to monitor shelter in place compliance. From Bluetooth to biometrics, countries are making use of the technology resources at hand to minimize the spread of COVID-19.
Probing Surveillance Technology in the Time of COVID-19: Early Lessons
The bloom of surveillance technology as the virus spreads allows us to contemplate what is at stake in the use of these technologies to fight contagion. In particular, I’ll review two early lessons on how privacy and good data are at stake.
1: Privacy: Lessons for governments and businesses
On the one hand, lives are at stake. We should all be in the business of saving lives right now. On the other hand, privacy is at stake. In the example of Unacast and the European governments making use of mobile data, data has been anonymized and aggregated. These are two well- known methods for protecting personally identifiable information (PII). In countries where central governments hold great power and surveillance technologies are pervasive, like China, Taiwan, and Russia, loss of privacy is more of a cultural norm. While I can imagine there to be citizen journalists in these countries that advocate for greater privacy, we do not see national press raising red flags like we do in the US (see pieces in the New York Times and Wired). As COVID-19 demonstrates the power of surveillance, individuals may develop more of a taste for privacy. A 2019 study by Cisco that included 2,600 adults from across Europe, Asia, and the Americas found that 84 percent of respondents reported they care about their data privacy and want more control of it.
32 percent of all respondents reported that not only do they care about privacy, but they had taken action to protect it by switching companies or providers. When deploying technologies that make use personal movement data, government and businesses must consider the public’s taste for privacy and use best practices when disclosing data like anonymization and aggregation to protect PII. We must also remember that equity plays a part in that our minoritized populations are particularly vulnerable to the biases that exist in our surveillance technologies.
2: The case for good data
If we do want to make use of contact tracking technologies, we need good data. So if we didn’t already have a case to ramp up and improve our ability to test individuals for COVID-19, here’s another. Effectively tracking COVID-19 cases requires open government data provided by public health agencies. Alternatively, we could rely on less trustworthy self reporting. Just like any data analytics project, whether its for business insights or public health, trash in is trash out. Accordingly, if we don’t have an accurate dataset of cases, we can’t possibly track contact.
Experiencing a pandemic can turn our life experience upside down and brings new perspective. These days, we cheer on our medical professionals, honk and smile at our truck drivers, and digitally connect with folks we’d go months without talking to. It is part of our nature, as humans, to react and react big to crises. At the same time, many of us who aren’t essential to fighting this pandemic must hunker down, stay distant, but stay productive. One thing we can do in this time of pause is clean house. Literally because many of are home-bound, but businesses can also digitally “clean house” by reviewing their data practices and data governance to ensure proper protocols are in place that uphold regulations and customers’ value for privacy. Businesses can also turn to data work to get rid of redundant and obsolete data that only costs money to maintain and weakens the ability to derive insights through data analytics.
Once we reach the other side of this and can visit our favorite cafes and restaurants, become employed, visit our grandparents, give rest to our health care workers, we must review the decisions we made in this time of high stakes and take stock of what we’ve put in place in terms of sanctioned use of personally identifiable information and movement data. Yes, we should document the benefit of surveillance in a time of public crisis, but we should also take steps to restore privacy and practice quality data collection and governance.