Why Surveillance Is Here To Stay

Profit and control. JL

Carrie Cordero and Richard Fontaine report in the Wall Street Journal:

There will be a temptation to trade personal information for better monitoring across a range of activities. Cardiac signature recognition can detect heartbeat patterns at a distance, which might help doctors but could be used to identify individuals. DNA phenotyping may help physicians prescribe more targeted treatments but might also predict facial features. Data is already used in ways that Americans haven’t fully digested; information from fitness trackers, which monitor sleep patterns, heart rates and location, is already used in personal-injury lawsuits, criminal cases and divorce proceedings.

Washington’s post-9/11 debate about how much surveillance a free society should allow has suddenly become about much more than counterterrorism and national security. Amid today’s global pandemic, key technology companies are in talks with federal and state governments about employing their tools against Covid-19. Facebook, which holds a trove of geolocation information, is sharing disease-migration maps. Clearview AI, a facial-recognition tech firm, may be able to track infected patients and identify people they have met. Smart thermometers are recording and transmitting fevers in real time. The data firm Palantir is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to collect and analyze vast information streams.

All this and more, we hope, will help to stop the virus in its tracks, save lives and help Americans get back to normal. But such efforts—done in haste—also raise searching questions about the balance between privacy and public health. Decisions being made on the fly by governments, private firms and individuals will change the country’s digital social contract for years to come.

China’s approach to monitoring its infected citizens is famously authoritarian, with a new app telling users whether they can move freely based on a personal health analysis—and, not incidentally, sharing their location with the police. Citizens in democracies would no doubt reject such intrusive measures, but the pandemic has spurred key countries to consider new infringements on privacy.

British officials, for example, hope to roll out a new smartphone app that will alert users who have come in contact with an infected individual, using location data drawn from GPS, Wi-Fi networks and even Bluetooth beacons. A separate app, developed by researchers outside of government, will map British infections and share information with officials. Its developers say the U.K. government can delete the data at some point and pledge not to publicize the movements of infected patients.

But South Korea has done just that. By analyzing cellphone locations, CCTV feeds and bank transactions, Seoul has established a publicly available website that tracks individual locations and contacts. Interested observers have already mined the data to make guesses about who is visiting “love hotels” and having affairs. Meanwhile, Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security service has established a system that combines individuals’ credit history with cell-based location information—and works even if a phone’s tracking is disabled.

These measures seem to help fight the virus, and help right now is what we need. If such steps do work, how much privacy will Americans be willing to give up for a better shot at dodging the virus?

Data from fitness trackers is already used in personal-injury lawsuits, criminal cases and divorce proceedings.

Data is already used in ways that many Americans haven’t fully digested. For example, information from fitness trackers—which monitor sleep patterns, heart rates and location, among other things—is already used in personal-injury lawsuits, criminal cases and divorce proceedings.

Today’s crisis is the new coronavirus, but there will be a temptation to trade personal information for better health monitoring across a range of activities. Cardiac signature recognition can detect heartbeat patterns at a distance, which might help doctors but could also be used to identify individuals. DNA phenotyping may help physicians prescribe more targeted treatments but might also predict facial features. Would any of this be fair game in the next crisis?

To answer that, Americans will need to know what data is going where, to whom, for how long, for what purposes and how all this will be overseen. Government officials and tech firms insist that their collaboration in the coronavirus fight will preserve anonymity, protect civil liberties and have an expiration date. But everyone is moving fast. It’s not too early to look closely at both the disease and the digital treatments that officials are prescribing.