Publisher's Synopsis
Public health officials around the world are struggling to respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To contain the highly infectious disease, governments have turned to mobile phone surveillance programs to augment traditional public health interventions. These programs have been designed to track COVID-19 symptoms, map population movement, trace the contacts of infected persons, enforce quarantine orders, and authorize movement through health passes. Although these programs enable more-robust public health interventions, they also raise concerns that the privacy and civil liberties of users will be violated. In this report, the authors evaluate the short- and long-term privacy harms associated with the use of these programs-including political, economic, and social harms. They consider whether two potentially competing goals can be achieved concurrently: (1) the use of mobile phones as public health surveillance too
