Coronavirus threatens your 'digital liberties,' privacy group warns

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It may be necessary to curb some civil liberties in times of emergency, such as the coronavirus outbreak, but any measure must he limited and temporary, the the Electronic Frontier Foundation advised Tuesday.

"As in other major emergencies in the past, there is a hazard that the data surveillance infrastructure we build to contain COVID-19 may long outlive the crisis it was intended to address," the organization said. "The government and its corporate cooperators must roll back any invasive programs created in the name of public health after [the] crisis has been contained."

Closely related to that concern is the worry over transparency.

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"Any government use of 'big data' to track virus spread must be clearly and quickly explained to the public. This includes publication of detailed information about the information being gathered, the retention period for the information, the tools used to process that information, the ways these tools guide public health decisions, and whether these tools have had any positive or negative outcomes."

And undoubtedly there will be conflicts with constitutional rights, it said.

"If the government seeks to limit a person's rights based on this 'big data' surveillance (for example, to quarantine them based on the system's conclusions about their relationships or travel), then the person must have the opportunity to timely and fairly challenge these conclusions and limits," EFF's report said.

The organization said that in its response to COVID-19, governments around the globe "are collecting and analyzing personal information about large numbers of identifiable people, including their health, travel and personal relationships."

Such "special efforts" are warranted, the group said, because "public policy must reflect a balance between collective good and civil liberties in order to protect the health and safety of our society from communicable disease outbreaks."

The threats come when "life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, to outlive their urgency."

EFF said programs that collect information about people en masse must be "scientifically justified and deemed necessary by public health experts for the purpose of containment."

And, the report said, there is historic precedent for such global efforts to incorporate "improper government containment efforts driven by bias based on nationality, ethnicity, religion, and race – rather than facts about a particular individual’s actual likelihood of contracting the virus, such as their travel history or contact with potentially infected people."

Already troubling, EFF said, are reports the Chinese government demands citizens load software to their phones so it can monitor every place they go.

The software then assigns a color code to "indicate their health status."

The U.S. also is facing concerns about its response, including a rule by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that demands "airline companies to collect the name and contact information of all passengers and crew arriving in the United States on international flights, and to transmit this information to the CDC within 24 hours of an order to do so," the report said.

Will that information be purged when it no longer is pertinent?

"Some use of big data may now be warranted as public health officials work to contain COVID-19. But it must be medically necessary, as determined by public health experts; any new processing of personal data must be proportionate to the actual need; people must not be scrutinized because of their nationality or other demographic factors; and any new government powers must expire when the disease is contained," the report said.