76 - Surveillance, Privacy and COVID-19

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).

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Show Notes

Topics discussed include

• The value of privacy
• Do we balance privacy against other rights/values?
• The significance of consent in debates about consent
• Digital contact tracing and digital quarantines
• The ethics of digital contact tracing
• Is the value of digital contact tracing being oversold?
• The relationship between testing and contact tracing
• COVID 19 as an important moment in the fight for privacy
• The data economy in light of COVID 19
• The ethics of immunity passports
• The importance of focusing on the right things in responding to COVID 19

 

Relevant Links

• Carissa's Webpage
• Carissa's Twitter feed (a treasure trove of links about privacy and surveillance)
• Views on Privacy: A Survey by Sian Brooke and Carissa Véliz
• Data, Privacy and the Individual by Carissa Véliz
• Science paper on the value of digital contact tracing
• The Apple-Google proposal for digital contact tracing
• ''The new normal': China's excessive coronavirus public monitoring could be here to stay' 
• 'In Coronavirus Fight, China Gives Citizens a Color Code, With Red Flags'
• 'To curb covid-19, China is using its high-tech surveillance tools'
• 'Digital surveillance to fight COVID-19 can only be justified if it respects human rights'
• 'Why ‘Mandatory Privacy-Preserving Digital Contact Tracing’ is the Ethical Measure against COVID-19' by Cansu Canca
• 'The COVID-19 Tracking App Won't Work' 
• 'What are 'immunity passports' and could they help us end the coronavirus lockdown?'
• 'The case for ending the Covid-19 pandemic with mass testing'