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Abstract:
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Many public health officials and members of society are advocating for better containment strategies of the COVID-19 pandemic and justice for the racial inequality. Most of these strategies require methods such as contact tracing to identify people who may have interacted with an infected person. However, ensuring public safety for society comes at a potentially steep privacy cost, increased government surveillance of every American’s movement through smartphone location data. There’s a critical tension between personal privacy and the common good: collecting too much information could facilitate stalking and other crimes, but collecting too little renders contact tracing ineffective. But another tension is often overlooked: marginalized groups, most notably people of color and people with low incomes, are more vulnerable to exposure of their private data. Any efforts to relax data protections should acknowledge and account for these unequal risks. This talk introduces and surveys the unequal privacy cost to marginalized groups, especially during the pandemic, and what we should do to help.
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