- The pandemic future is here, and it's watching you.
Imagine you need to go to the store,
but the location tracking app you were forced to download
will report your every move.
And since you weren't supposed to leave campus,
you'll now be locked out of your dorm.
Maybe you should go for a run instead.
Only, if your body temperature is raised,
that might trigger a health monitoring device
you were pressured into wearing.
Now, you can't participate in campus activities.
You think about your part-time job
and wonder about the camera-tracking technology
installed to monitor social distancing.
Get too close to a coworker, and you could lose your job.
Lose your job, and you won't have health insurance.
And you really need to keep your health insurance.
There is a global pandemic, after all.
This isn't the distant future
or some "Black Mirror" episode.
This is already happening today, here in America.
It turns out the latest casualty of the pandemic
might just be your privacy.
Allow me to be the bearer of bad news.
The coronavirus isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
For starters, we're probably not getting
a vaccine anytime soon.
And even if by some miracle we do,
it won't magically save all of us.
In all of human history,
We've only successfully eradicated
one human virus: smallpox.
And that was almost 200 years after the first experimental
smallpox vaccines were developed.
This new pandemic normal
is what's worrying scores of privacy and policy experts
as well as elected officials.
And as we turn to technology like app-based contact tracing
to help mitigate the risks,
we now have to deal with surveillance creep
on top of the pandemic.
History has shown us again and again,
once a new form of surveillance technology is deployed,
regardless of its original intention,
that technology is often used for other purposes
than how it was initially sold to the public.
Take San Diego's smart streetlights.
Originally, pitched as a way to help reduce
traffic fatalities and carbon emissions,
the network of cameras is now used by police
to do things like surveil Black Lives Matter protesters,
or take the location data generated by apps
on millions of Americans' phones,
originally gathered for advertising and marketing purposes,
the location data is now bought
by the Department of Homeland Security
and used for quote, "immigration and border enforcement."
All this is cause for concern,
especially because a ton of new companies
are now building marketing
and selling new surveillance technology
meant to track the daily habits of millions of Americans.
Michigan's Oakland University, for example,
recently attempted to use BioButtons,
quote, "a coin-size disposable medical device
that measures continuous temperature and other vital signs
for a remarkable 90 days."
BioButtons were initially supposed to be mandatory,
but the students pushed back.
At Harvard, students can opt out
of location-tracking service, Tracefi,
but to do so, they have to turn off
the Wi-Fi on their devices.
There are other forms of tracking
being employed today in the US
that are not optional at all.
And globally, it's even worse.
In Israel, authorities use drones
to literally peer into people's home windows
to make sure that they are quarantining.
In China, drones equipped with thermal imaging
were used to keep people indoors.
A mandatory contact tracing app in Qatar
exposed the name, health status and location data
of over one million users.
A US contact tracing app secretly shared location data
with Foursquare.
It doesn't have to be this way.
Legislators across the country are pushing bills
specifically designed to protect people's privacy
during an ongoing pandemic.
While we don't have a national data privacy law,
there are proposed COVID-19 privacy bills in Congress
and in the state legislatures
of California, New York and New Jersey.
The US government has long demonstrated its willingness
to engage in unconstitutional surveillance of its citizens.
We need to codify these protections into law now,
before things get worse.
Because if there's anything the past few years have shown us
it's that things can always get worse.
(soft music)