Coronavirus tracking sparks surveillance concerns

The portable supercomputers people carry around in their pockets may hold the key to stemming the coronavirus pandemic, some public health experts say.

In places such as South Korea, Singapore and China, governments are relying on phone location data to carry out extremely precise and targeted “contact tracing” for people who test positive for the virus.

Israel’s domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, tracks people’s cellphone locations, allowing the government to text people who came in contact with a patient who has tested positive. Singapore is taking a similar approach. South Korea is using a mix of location data, digital records and camera footage to track where infected people have been.

In China, a mesh of overlapping systems track people as they move through public transport, taxis, commercial centers, and even specific neighborhoods and buildings, serving to both document where they have been and block potential carriers from moving about and further spreading the disease.

But in the United States, where individual liberty is culturally prized and privacy is enshrined in the Constitution, a tech-based approach faces serious obstacles.

“This is a crisis, and we need to look at everything at our disposal, but we also need to be careful about how we do so,” said Jay Stanley, a privacy expert at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“We do have privacy laws that constrain government access to data,” he added.

Gigi Sohn, a distinguished fellow at the Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law and Policy, put it more bluntly.

“If the government were to take on this kind of surveillance, I think it would be struck down for violating the Fourth Amendment,” she said.