This is such a vast spider web of contacts.
This data that will be transferring
between phones will now be encrypted.
What more do we know about how
this is actually going to work?
The clamor to improve contact tracing
has seen nations like Israel, Singapore,
South Korea, and of course, China using a combination
of location data, video camera footage,
and credit card information to track
and contain COVID-19 in their countries.
We're prepared, and we're doing a great job with it.
It will go away, just stay calm, it will go away.
The U.S. has lagged behind,
but Google and Apple are feverishly building
a contact tracing platform,
scheduled for release in mid-May.
It will enable the use of Bluetooth technology
to help governments and health agencies
reduce the spread of the virus by tracing people
who have come into close contact with COVID-19.
But how exactly this information will be used in the future
and with whom is an open question.
Well, we're kind of at this fascinating moment, right,
where we don't know exactly what the response
is gonna look like.
We know that robust contact tracing
is gonna be a huge part of re-opening the economy,
and we know that we have to balance that
with privacy concerns, somehow, but we don't know
exactly what the balance is gonna look like.
And I leave it up to the epidemiologists to say
whether you need to be as repressive as China
or if there are ways to protect privacy.
We might not have a ton of time to debate it.
And that's kind of the problem.
There are currently few legal protections
from data misuse or abuse, and while some states
do have some laws in place,
progress on this front has been halted.
There was some privacy momentum in Congress
before the pandemic hit,
and that's been destroyed for obvious reasons.
California passed a privacy law a couple of years ago,
and there's been a lot of work
to try to improve it as it goes into effect this year.
A bunch of other states have been considering
privacy legislation as well,
like Washington State and New York,
and then covid comes and a lot of the states legislatures
have just pretty much shut down.
Now before you envision a Black Mirror episode
for your personal future, you should know
that as of now, involvement will be voluntary.
The data it collects is to be anonymized,
and there will be no central server
where the data is stored, so governments or corporations
can't directly grab all this private data
for its own purposes, but that could easily change.
There's nothing really to stop them
from having a centralized database.
It's only the restraint of our expectations.
If our expectations were to become overturned
and again shift tremendously over to safety,
it could become a lot more Orwellian a lot quicker.
There's many scenarios
that could be quite troubling.
For example...
Your information could be given to insurance companies,
and it could be used as a pre-existing condition
that prevents you from getting insurance
or as a reason to charge you much higher prices.
The information could be sold to data brokers,
who could then package it to anyone that they want.
The information could end up with your employer,
who could use it to make decisions about
whether to promote you because of your health.
Now, that may sound a little paranoid,
but we have good reason to be suspicious.
These are entities that already collect
enormous amounts of our data in a commercial context,
and whose mishandling of data
has come under fire in the past.
Exhibit A.
Cambridge Analytica.
We just traded away everything there is
to know about ourselves for Farmville,
and I think that people are starting to realize
that wasn't a good trade.
In 2016, the big data company Cambridge Analytica
took the personal data of millions
of Americans from Facebook.
They packaged it and sold it so that political groups
could then target parts of the population
with narrow casted messages.
People were sharing information with friends,
and they weren't necessarily expecting that data
to be shared by a company like Cambridge Analytica
that was making use of it to build political profiles,
and then serve specific advertisements or propaganda.
Cambridge Analytica really captures
the dilemma of privacy, which is how data collected
for one reason, with certain expectations,
is used for another reason.
We have been giving away all of our
most private information to companies
that have then sold it on and created
what is now a multi-trillion dollar a year industry.
This was business as usual
as far as Facebook developers went.
This scandal resulted
in the Federal Trade Commission's fining
of Facebook for five billion dollars,
as well as a general push for broader privacy laws.
We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility,
and that was a big mistake,
and it was my mistake, and I'm sorry.
What you're seeing is a greater bipartisan concern
about the power of these data-opolies
and how do we rein them in.
So how do we know this
isn't gonna happen this time?
The answer comes back to those privacy protection laws
that have been put on hold because of the pandemic.
If there had been a national privacy law enacted
before the pandemic hit us, we probably would've been
in a better position to respond to it with data.
But even if there was a national
privacy law in place, contact tracing is actually pointless
if we don't have widespread testing
to go along with it, which we don't.
So what is this about?
Is this a smokescreen for collecting a lot of data?
Is the data truly gonna stay anonymized or aggregated?
The pandemic is showing why a general privacy law
is so important, because there's so much confusion
around data collection,
concern that there will be overreach,
and lack of rules about how the information
could be reused for other purposes.
Laws are going to be needed
to stem a lot of this corporate data collection,
and I think you're only going to see those efforts continue.
Short-term, I think they may be delayed because of covid,
but I think the fundamental concerns around
overly broad corporate collection aren't going away.
I don't see some centralized bureaucracy
that will then be shared with the police and the IRS
and your future employer
and your future insurer, at least not right now.
I think it is worth noting that
some of those things aren't forbidden.