The Sharpened Debate: Privacy and Surveillance during COVID-19
This chapter explores the ethical challenges and value of privacy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing its role in protecting us from abuses of power and its link to autonomy. It also raises questions about the impact of privacy on public health and the challenges of obtaining meaningful consent in data collection.
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How do we get back to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic? One suggestion is that we use increased amounts of surveillance and tracking to identify and isolate infected and at-risk persons. While this might be a valid public health strategy it does raise some tricky ethical questions. In this episode I talk to Carissa Véliz about these questions. Carissa is a Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, also at Oxford. She is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Digital Ethics as well as two forthcoming solo-authored books Privacy is Power (Transworld) and The Ethics of Privacy (Oxford University Press).
