“Michele Loi is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Zurich. He argues that proponents of privacy should not put privacy above health – else risk sliding into irrelevance.
[..] The second risk for privacy is paradoxical: it follows from having “too much respect” for privacy itself. If our concern with privacy prevents urgent political action for the sake of public health surveillance, people will blame additional deaths on privacy itself. People will stop valuing privacy as a good, and any commitment to its preservation will become unfashionable. Imagine that Europe survives the pandemic with ten times the number of deaths as China. It will be easy for the enemies of privacy to claim “that’s how much privacy costs in human lives”. Defenders of privacy will become few and unpopular.
To sum up: we need to rescue privacy from non-trustworthy governments. Public health surveillance provides the perfect excuse for governments to collect data to abuse, and that’s a clear risk. But, less evidently, we also need to rescue privacy from itself. [..] “
We must save privacy from privacy itself by Michele Loi on Algorithm Watch
This post was followed by a hackathon conducted remotely by a group of privacy advocates and technologists across the world. What was accomplished in a day by a group of focused individuals was impressive. See the outputs here hackCOVID.