Civil liberties or public health, or civil liberties and public health? Using surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19

ABSTRACT

To help tackle the spread of COVID-19 a range of surveillance technologies – smartphone apps, facial recognition and thermal cameras, biometric wearables, smart helmets, drones, and predictive analytics – have been rapidly developed and deployed. Used for contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, travel permission, social distancing/movement monitoring, and symptom tracking, their rushed rollout has been justified by the argument that they are vital to suppressing the virus, and civil liberties have to be sacrificed for public health. I challenge these contentions, questioning the technical and practical efficacy of surveillance technologies, and examining their implications for civil liberties, governmentality, surveillance capitalism, and public health.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• surveillance
• civil liberties
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the feedback of Alistair Fraser, Tracey Lauriault and Sophia Maalsen, along with two anonymous referees, on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Rob Kitchin is a professor of human geography at Maynooth University, Ireland. His research focuses on the relationship between digital technologies, society and space. He is (co)author or (co)editor of 30 academic books, numerous articles and book chapters, and is an editor of the journal Dialogues in Human Geography. https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/rob-kitchin.

Notes

1 For example, in Ireland Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the IDA Ireland launched a joint rapid-response call to fund research and innovation activities to develop solutions that can have demonstrable impact on the tackling the virus. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/urgent-call-out-for-irish-scientists-to-help-global-coronavirus-response-1.4217710

2 For example, the EU vs Virus hackathon, https://euvsvirus.org/; The Global Hack, https://theglobalhack.com/; an example of more bottom event is the Codevid Hackathon, https://codevid19.com/

3 Global Positioning System

4 In late April the Israeli Supreme Court banned its intelligence agency from tracing the phone location of those infected with Covid-19 until new legislation is passed. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52439145

5 Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps

6 https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/

7 https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1246079249544630279

8 See https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/1250071326372638736 for an example of how this might be done.

9 https://chp-dashboard.geodata.gov.hk/covid-19/en.html

10 https://twitter.com/WolfieChristl/status/1242956802930683913

11 Ada Lovelace Institute (2020); Guarglia and Schwartz (2020); Stanley (2020)

12 https://edpb.europa.eu/sites/edpb/files/files/file1/edpb_guidelines_20200420_contact_tracing_covid_with_annex_en.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland [Grant number 15/IA/3090].