全球智库信息集成服务系统

• Governments worldwide have leveraged mobile phone surveillance to augment traditional public health interventions in response to COVID-19. These programs track COVID-19 symptoms, map population movement, trace contacts of infected persons, enforce quarantine orders, and authorize movement through health passes.
• There is concern that, after the current public health crisis subsides, governments will be reluctant to relinquish the mobile phone surveillance programs that were deployed to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which could contribute to "surveillance creep."
• There are privacy-related effects of these programs, including discrimination and abuse by governments, employers, insurance companies, and others; criminal fraud and identity theft; and social and reputational harms.
• There are risks to vulnerable communities of both under-inclusion in health-enhancing mobile phone public health interventions, and over-inclusion in privacy-infringing programs.
• The threat to privacy can negatively affect government accountability and public trust.
• There is a need for a concise, standardized, and transparent privacy scorecard to evaluate and present the privacy implications of mobile surveillance programs.
• The three privacy criteria with the most "not satisfied" scores across all categories of programs are (1) whether the program is open source, (2) whether the program has a sunset clause, and (3) whether there is a firewall against law enforcement access to the data.
• Through the use of the scorecard, the research team found that there is considerable variance of the privacy implications across programs, even when those programs are designed to achieve similar goals.

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 tools to help manage COVID 19 and future public health crises, and (2) the protection of privacy and civil liberties.

To evaluate the privacy implications of COVID-19 mobile surveillance programs, the authors create a concise, transparent, and standardized privacy scorecard. They use this scorecard approach to evaluate 40 mobile phone surveillance programs from around the world. The results indicate that the privacy implications vary considerably across programs, even within programs designed to accomplish similar public health goals. The authors offer recommendations to U.S. federal, state, and local officials to implement COVID-19 surveillance programs that better protect privacy, especially that of vulnerable and marginalized communities.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  Mobile Surveillance Programs in COVID-19 Response

• Chapter Three

  Privacy Scoring for Mobile Surveillance Programs

• Chapter Four

  Recommendations

• Appendix A

  Privacy Scoring Methodology

• Appendix B

  Mobile Phone Data Surveillance Program Scorecards